An Exploration On Features Of Business Text And Its Translation Principles

Since the early 1980s, the study of English for business purpose has attracted growing interest and awareness globally. Following the step, the study on business text translation outranks many other subjects as the most popular field in China. Despite the enormous interest, the translation study has been found concentrated on word choosing, grammar transfer, and concrete translation techniques, far from systematic—a satisfactory business translation involves more than that, such as translator's role, heterogeneous cultures, and the translation client.Most established translation theories are regarded as disappointing to guide business translation because they are tailored to literature translation. Business translation, however, is believed to be a branch of pragmatic or non-literary translation. The overseas study is fruitful on advertising translation which only takes a tiny part, and hardly represents business translation as a whole (Mooij, 2004; Munday, 2004; Ho, 2004, etc.). In recent years, a couple of Chinese scholars have engaged themselves in exploring attractive and feasible criteria or principles in attempt to settle the problem. Many debates focus on the application of "equivalency" and "communicative translation" to business translation. Some support the hot concept of "equivalency" (Zhou Liren, 2000; Zhang Ying, 2003); Some believe "communicative translation" is applicable (Fang Mengzhi, 2003, Liu Xiaoyan, 2007), Fang suggesting its application to the whole pragmatic translation and Liu employing it in the advertising translation; Others put forward specialized principles (Liu Fagong, 2002; Zhang Xinhong, 2003; Peng Ping, 2004; Xu Qin & Wu Ying, 2003), however, these principles more or less remain linguistic-oriented. This thesis is a response to the need for more research to be done in the field, and aims at exploring specialized criteria as well for business translation from perspectives of linguistic expression, textual function, the translator's role, and the translation client's requirement, and suggests eight principles to be followed in actual business text translating: consistency of translated names, responsibility of the translator, intension of the client, terminology awareness, international standard, cross-cultural awareness, accuracy of information, and logical language. The first letters of these principles combine to form the acronym CRITICAL, coincident with the rising demand for translators who ought to be CRITICAL while translating business texts.One translation concept, "equivalence," leads all the way to form the CRITICAL principle together with three major contributors: Business English text features, the translator's role and the general characteristics of non-literary translation. The hot term "equivalence" sure deserves much talk particularly the negative views about it, for instance, that of Newmark. What is interesting may be the part dealing with equivalence-based theories and communicative translation, in which the former is found loyal to "equivalence" concept as they are expected, and the latter is discovered in no opposition to "equivalence effect" completely. Based on quite a few research results from home and abroad, five features of Business English texts are concluded in this thesis, namely, informative, formulaic, transactional, professional, and cross-cultural; the translator's role in the business context is identified as a trinity: a specialist in linguistic and subject matters, a responsibility bearer, and a trail blazer. The general characteristics of non-literary translation (Liu Changshuan, 2004) or pragmatic translation (Fang Mengzhi, 2003) provide precious foundation for the establishment of CRITICAL principle.Business translation in this thesis is narrowed in Chinese-English business translation based on two primary considerations: English-Chinese translation outnumbers Chinese-English translation and causes less problems, thus increasing the significance of studying Chinese-English business translation; the growing economic activities between China and foreign countries call for higher requirement in Chinese-English business translation. So the term is used throughout the thesis to refer to Chinese-English business translation.