Contract English: Linguistic Features And Translation

This thesis is a systematic study of English-Chinese (E-C) translation of English contracts on the basis of a detailed analysis on the linguistic features of English contracts, and with an aim to propose tangible and implementable translation solutions.This paper presents a brief survey of the most commonly used translation models, including theories by Chinese scholars: Yan Fu's 3-Character Model (faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance), Fu Lei's Similarity of Spirit Model and Qian Zhongshu's Perfection Model, and by western scholars: Nida's Dynamic Equivalence Model and Newmark's Communicative Translation Model.This paper also offers the author's opinions and judgment as to the appropriateness and practicality of these models within the highly specialized and narrow-focused area of E-C translation of English contracts. The author finds these models to be appealing in a broad sense because they provide much grist for the cognitive mill and offer general guidelines in translation. However, at micro-level, these theories are too wide in scope and open to too many interpretations to be rigid and practical solutions in the field of E-C translation of English contracts. For practitioners in everyday practice inference making and spontaneous liberal interpretation are not a viable option to meet the rigorous exactitude required by contracts. Therefore this paper develops a set of sound and practicable micro-level E-C translation techniques of English contracts, which can be easily adopted by translation specialists so as to aid and boost translation productivity.This study examines in detail the linguistic characteristics of English contracts including lexicon - adoption of archaic words, preference for formal words, prevalence of terminologies, model auxiliaries and word types; phrases - conjoined phrases, adverbial modifiers, nominal structures and prepositional phrases; syntax -attributive clauses, adverbial clauses, long sentences, passive sentences and corresponding translation techniques - deletion, word order adjustment, transformation of parts of speech and finally sentence combination and splitting. With...