A Functionalist Study On The Translation Of International Maritime Conventions

With the flourishing of international trade and shipping business, maritime conventions play a more and more important role in regulating and standardizing maritime activities. The translation of international maritime conventions into Chinese is of great importance for China to implement these conventions effectively and adequately, and to set references for the making of domestic maritime regulations.There have been many studies on the translation of international maritime conventions, but almost all of them adopted the traditional qualitative linguistically-oriented 'bottom-up' approach, from the micro-level perspective, analyzing the target and source texts by studying a few sentences or words. This method is prescriptive and evaluative and may not be adequate to fully reveal the characteristics of both the source texts and the target texts.The present study approaches international maritime conventions translation by employing the top-down methodology recommended by the functionalist translation theories. By integrating the macro-level of translation skopos and text functions with the micro-level of focusing on syntactic structures in the translation practice, this thesis explores the translation techniques of international maritime conventions at the sentence level both quantitatively and qualitatively, and makes an analysis of the rationality and applicability of the functionalist translation theory as the guideline for international maritime conventions translation studies. With the specific aim of investigating the translation techniques at the sentence level, this study is corpus based, using a parallel corpus CONVENTIONPARA, which contains three sub-corpora, namely STCWPARA, SOLASPARA and MARPOLPARA. The corpus is aligned at the sentence level with the anchor and overlap algorithm.The following conclusions are reached from the study:(1) In the parallel corpus, 97.8% of the sentences have the 1:1 alignments, larger than 84.7%, that of non-literary parallel corpus developed by Beijing Foreign Studies University. In addition, there are also 1:2, 2:1 and 3:1 (E-C) sentence alignment, accounting for 0.74%, 1.44% and 0.02% respectively.(2) International maritime conventions are composed of very long sentences; the mean sentence length is 37.22. In translating the long sentences in the three conventions, five of the six commonly recognized techniques are used, namely embedding, cutting, reversing, splitting, and inserting. Combination of these techniques is suitable for translating long sentences.(3) Passive voice is frequently used in the source text, amounting for 29.8% of the total sentence pairs. These passive voices are translated into active voice, non-subject sentences, and passive voice.(4) The functionalist translation theory offers a rational and satisfactory explanation on the translation strategies used in international maritime conventions translation. The rationality and applicability of the functionalist approach as the guideline for international maritime conventions translation studies are shown and proved in the study.