Contract Translating: A Functional Stylistic Approach

With the development of economic globalization and China's opening to the outside world, contract translation is showing more and more importance. Contract belongs to a type of legal document, while traditional legal translation theory over-emphasizes strict literal translation. Nowadays, people come to realize that the creativity of legal translators assumes an important role in legal translation and directly influences the quality of translation. Nevertheless, it is not yet agreed upon how far the legal translator can stretch their limited freedom. On the other hand, it is widely acknowledged that style is a very important element to be considered in legal translation and many researches have been carried out in this respect, whereas most studies remain traditional, characterized by general and impressionistic comments or by intuitive analysis, which bypass the realities of the legal text.Modern stylistic theory, Functional Stylistics (FS), offers fresh ways to style translation. Many stylisticians applied it to the study of literary language and made remarkable achievement. The author finds that FS is also fit for analysis of legal document and thus sheds light on legal translation. This foundation includes multi-strata theory, context theory and functional theory, which can offer explanation to both the in-text linguistic phenomena and the extra-text cultural and situational factors. They combine linguistic medium, content and language functions together to deepen people's understanding of the essence of contract and to make up for some deficiencies brought about by traditional stylistic analysis and translation, and to overcome the shortcomings of literal translation. Compared with other stylistic theories, Functional Stylistics is more comprehensive, penetrating and systematic in contract analysis and translation. Thus this thesis tries to employ FS to analyze and translate contract. It is divided into seven chapters.In Chapter One, the significance of contract translation is illuminated, and the object and scope of this thesis are introduced.Then Chapter Two gives a survey of contract. First, the definition and classification of contract are presented, and it is pointed out that language used in contract belongs to language of law. Then the brief history of legal translation is surveyed and some points essential to the choice of translation methodology are clarified: according to different goals, legal translation can be classified into authoritative and non-authoritative translation, and this thesis focuses on theformer; there are different views on text typology of legal text.Chapter Three introduces the theoretical basis - Functional Stylistics - on which the present study and investigation are founded. This chapter first surveys the literature review of this foundation. Then the linguistic background is elucidated including multi-strata theory, context theory and functional theory; and its views on style are presented.Chapter Four elaborates the necessity and applicability of FS to contract translation: First, FS adopts a fresh functional approach, which is more penetrating when applied to style translation in the general sense. Second, FS provides a pluralist, hence a more comprehensive approach to stylistic analysis. Third, FS stresses on the relations between linguistic system and society, which is predominant in legal text. Fourth, FS lays equal stress on the three meta-functions and solves the contradiction regarding the text typology, i.e. primary function of legal text; thus it is particularly suitable for legal text analysis. Fifth, based on the above it brings to light the essential goal of authoritative legal translation: to achieve functional equivalence. Finally, FS provides a framework and theoretical models for identifying and transferring the style in contract.And in the practical analysis of the thesis: Chapter Five and Chapter Six, the stylistic features of contract are thoroughly examined from the perspective of functions at the levels of context, meta-functions and lexico-grammar, and it...