Translation Of Business Bad News Letters-from Perspectives Of The Subject, Modal Verbs And Information Flow

With the development of the global economy, business letters play more and more important role in international business interaction. Accordingly, the translation of business letters also plays an important part in this cross-cultural communication. A qualified business letter translation contributes to the success of a deal, while a false or insufficient translation may hamper business communication, or make the company involved in a great loss.In the business letters that communicate bad news, the writer has to fulfill two incompatible desires in one message, that is, first, to convey the bad news and second, and to maintain the good relationship with the reader. Unless this is done properly, it may bring economic loss to the company. As a result, in translating the bad news business letters, the writer must convey the message effectively; make the reader understand the letter fully so as to achieve the aim of business communication.The purpose of business letters is to convey the message, maintain interpersonal relationship and lead to the corresponding actions. Therefore, in the translation of business letters, the communication need and expression customs should become the primary concern of the translator. This paper makes use of translation theories of functional equivalence to study the bad-news business letters (four kinds of typical bad news letters), probes into the characteristics and strategies of cross-cultural translation from aspects of the subject, modal verbs and information flow so as to achieve functional equivalence between the target and source text.The thesis is composed of five chapters. Chapter One presents a brief introduction, including the study motivation, purpose and research methods used in this paper. Chapter Two is the literature review, pointing out the importance, classifications and functions of the business letters. Next comes Chapter Three, elaborating on the major theories applied in the thesis—Halliday's meta-functional theory (mainly the interpersonal function and textual function) and equivalence based theory. Then follows Chapter Four, the major and indispensable part of this thesis,, which defines and sub-categorizes the business bad news letters, analyzes four kinds of bad news letters with the theories in Chapter Three, summarizes the differences between the English and Chinese business bad news letters from the aspects of the subject, modal verbs and information structure and based upon the findings some translation strategies are proposed. The last chapter brings what is discussed in the above chapters to a conclusion and points out the limitation and makes some recommendation for further study.