A Stylistic Approach To E-C Translation Of Business Contracts

As a member country of the WTO, China is involving itself in the world's economy more and more profoundly and widely. As is known to all, business contracts are, in the contemporary highly-legalized society, playing an ever-increasingly important role in people's economic activities, and thus the translation of business contracts is more often than not an urgent task awaiting competent translators.Although the translation of business contracts has a lot in common with the translation of documents of any other kind, language in business contracts has its unique stylistic features and shall be given enough attention to when such documents are translated. Unfortunately, there has been an absence of profound and systematic theory typical of the translation of business contracts. It is a pity that skills involved in the translation of business contracts are only discussed in general, where only few examples are illustrated.Beginning with an analysis of business contracts, the thesis intends to discuss the methods to be employed in the E-C translation of business contracts, with a focus on the lexicon and syntax levels. From the examples given in this thesis, it can be seen that the translation techniques discussed play an important role in the E-C translation of business contracts.The thesis consists of five chapters and a conclusion. Chapter one conducts a discussion of Stylistics and contracts from a general perspective. Chapter two starts by distinguishing stylistic features of business contracts from the perspectives of lexicon and syntax and then moves on to a proposal for the criteria to be adopted in the translation of business contracts. In chapter three, the author contrasts traditional Chinese translation theories and western translation theories. And specific translation criteria for business contracts are summarized as two equivalences: the equivalence of semantic message from source language to target language and the equivalence of stylistic message from source language to target language. Chapter four and chapter five are the most important parts of this thesis. Quite a few examples are elaborated from the perspective of E-C translation on both lexicon and syntax levels. After these examples are analyzed, it is concluded that such techniques as discussed in this thesis are widely employed in the translation of business contracts and they are effective means to achieve the closest natural equivalence in the E-C translation of business contracts.The thesis discusses the E-C translation techniques from the perspective of lexicon and syntax stylistic features. Although it cannot contribute much to the establishment of a systematic theory of the translation of business contracts, the thesis is after all an attempt to combine E-C contrastive study with the translation of business contracts. The translation of business contracts is a brand new field in China's translation circle and it requires flexible application of various translation techniques; on top of that, it requires language proficiency and consistent scrutiny on the part of a translator. It is the author's sincere hope that the thesis will throw some light on the translation of business contracts and a profound and systematic theory of the translation of business contracts will be come up with soon.