Business Negotiation: Discourse Analysis And Translation

With the further globalization of economy, international business negotiation has become an indispensable part of trade and business. Meanwhile, there emerges more and more academic research on international business negotiation.This thesis is a tentative endeavor to investigate business negotiation from the perspective of discourse analysis, and to find out the optimal relevance through context and traits of discourse for the purpose of successful communication and better understanding.The author points out that a discourse as a whole plays an important role in the research on business negotiation from the perspective of linguistics. In cross-cultural business negotiation, the discourse pattern of both parties varied widely according to then-respective cultural background. Therefore, the correct understanding of the discourse pattern becomes the key to the success of negotiation.Four theories of discourse analysis are introduced. The theory of cohesion introduces formal devices that build texture; the Speech Act theory and principles of conversation study discourse as social act and interaction; the context of discourse, including situational context and cultural context, stresses the contextual aspects of meaning which are negotiated by the social relations and identities of participants in communication. It is found that on the formal links dimension of discourse, miscoreferentiality, ellipsis and substitution, lexical repetition, parallelism found themselves different between English and Chinese discourses. Besides, the viewpoint of the Speech Acts (locutionary act, illocutionary act, perlocutionary act), the Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle of conversation, the situational and cultural contexts play very important roles in organizing and understanding utterances in business negotiation.In cognitive science, many theories are of great importance. Relevance Theory views language communication as a cognitive process, an ostensive-inferential process, closely related to people's psychological activities. Language is understood in certain context, so language or the use of language should be studied in a certain context. The thesis takes the Relevance Theory as the primary theoretic foundation, illustrating the arguement that the responsibility of translator is to coordinate the intention of the original writer/speaker with the expectation of the target reader/hearer. In this thesis, the Relevance theory is applied to the vagueness, humorous utterance, euphemistic expressions, idioms and culture-loaded words in negotiation.