A Study On E-C Translation Of Foreign Trade Contracts

Owning to China's opening up to the outside world and its entry into WTO, Sino-foreign communication in the field of business is on the rise day by day. Foreign trade contracts play an important role in business communication and consequently its translation has been put on agenda and draws much attention from translators and scholars. On the one hand, it prescribes the rights and obligations of contracting parties; On the other hand, it provides business information for them. Therefore, it is a matter of great importance whether an English foreign contract is well rendered into Chinese. As an interdisciplinary subject, translation, E-C translation of foreign trade contracts in particular, asks for bilingual capability as well as relevant professional knowledge.Although translators and scholars open their eyes to the studies on translation of foreign trade contracts and achievements have been made, it is still regarded as a component of legal translation or contract translation and pertinent research on this particular subject is scarce. Because of limited number of culturally-loaded words contained, most of research on its translation aims at imparting practical techniques for translators instead of business culture and legal culture.In view of this fact, the thesis is intended to conduct a comparatively comprehensive study on this subject and probe into issues related to E-C translation of foreign trade contracts with a view to assisting the translators with pragmatic techniques and deepening their understanding on the business culture and the awareness of law it impels.This thesis consists of four chapters besides Introduction and Conclusion.The Introduction outlines the background for writing this thesis, the current situation of research in China and the purpose of this writing.Chapter One offers a general survey of E-C translation of foreign trade contracts. It first introduces the definition, classifications and structure of English foreign trade contracts, then proposes the problems involved as: "infidelity to the original text", "misunderstanding the grammatical structure", "ignorance of professional knowledge", "ignorance of conventions" and narrates the difficulties that translators are facing.Chapter Two analyzes the linguistic features of English foreign trade contract on lexical, syntactic and textual level on which the next chapter bases.Chapter Three explores the specific E-C translation techniques via comparative analysis between English and Chinese and on the basis of it, the criteria and strategies of E-C translation of foreign trade contracts are brought forth, after foreign trade contracts are categorized to informative and vocative text in terms of functions of text.Chapter Four first confirms the close relationship between language, culture and translation and explains the significance of E-C translation of foreign trade contract in terms of business culture and legal awareness.The Conclusion summarizes the whole thesis, makes suggestion to E-C translation of foreign trade contracts and points out the limitations of this thesis.