A Contrastive Study On Two English Versions Of The Foreign Trade Law Of The PRC

The Foreign Trade Law of the People's Republic China (FTL) wasadopted at the 7^th Meeting of the Standing Committee of the 8^th NationalPeople's Congress on May 12, 1994, and was amended and adopted at the8th Meeting of the Standing Committee of the 10th National People'sCongress on April 6, 2004. The amended FTL came into effect on July 1,2004.The enactment of FTL has met the actual needs of the development of China'ssocialist market economy. FTL plays an important part in governing andregulating the market economy in China, such as contributing to China'sopening to the outside world, maintaining its foreign trade order and protectingthe legitimate rights and interests of foreign trade operators in China.In April, 2004, China Legal Publishing House published the Englishversion of FTL (hereinafter referred to as FTLV1); in July of the same year,China Commerce & Trades Press published another English version (hereinafter referredto as FTLV2).With the development of China's reform and opening to the outside world,especially after China's entry into the WTO, it is a general trend that more andmore laws and regulations in this field are coming into being in our country andall of them have to be translated into English. However, merits anddeficiencies co-exist in the legal document translation at present. Legaldocument translation is a new field in China's translation circle. In legaldocument translation from Chinese into English, the linguistic features of bothlanguages should be kept in mind. Owing to the wide difference in lexical andsyntactic features between the two languages, there are lots of issues worthdiscussion and research within Chinese-English legal document translation,including the general principles as well as the practical techniques of legaldocuments translation. This thesis presents a tentative study of the features oflegal documents translation by making comments on two English versions ofFTL. The thesis is divided into five chapters.Chapter One is the general introduction to FTL, its content and thesignificance of the study of its English versions.Chapter Two is a general review of translation theories, including currentwestern translation theories and present Chinese translation studies. Then,Newmark's theory, especially his communicative and semantic translation, isintroduced. The basic principle of applying Newmark's theory to legaldocument translation, that is, semantic translation supplemented bycommunicative translation, is advocated in legal document translation.Chapter Three is a survey of linguistic characteristics of the English usedin legal documents. The thesis analyzes the lexical, grammatical, andsemantic features respectively.The main body of the thesis is Chapter Four, in which the author conductsa detailed contrastive study on the two English versions. Legal Englishbelongs to a special category, and so at the beginning of this chapter, theprinciples of legal document translation, that is, formalness, conciseness,preciseness and creativity are tentatively proposed.Formalness is the most conspicuous feature of legal language, and it isexhibited by the use of archaic words, formal words and idiomatic expressions.Conciseness is drawing more and more attention from translators. As forconciseness, the author comes up with some effective means on an analysisof the two English versions of FTL, including proper use of pronouns, using aword to replace a phrase, avoiding semantic repetition, and modification.Preciseness is the fundamental feature of legal English and the author wouldlike to find ways to secure preciseness, e.g. avoiding using of the seemingcounterpart, repetition of words, application of modal verbs, translation ofnumerals, achieving semantic completion, avoiding mistranslation andrepetition of words Last but not the least, the author states that the translationof legal documents shall obey the principle of creativity as well, where suchskills as conversion, transformation of voice and transformation of negationare frequently adopted.