An Analysis On The Writing Skills Of Foreign Trade English Based On The Register Theory

Since China took the policy of reforming and opening up to the outside world, the international trade has developed rapidly in the big cities along the seaside and in the inland places. Entering the 21st century, especially after China entry into the WTO, the international trade develops more rapidly, which contributes a lot both to Chinese economy and the global economy. As the rapid development of international trade, the function of foreign trade English is more and more important and the need for qualified foreign trade operators is bigger and bigger. However, the analysis on foreign trade English is far from enough.In international trade transaction, the buyers and sellers are from different countries, they may have different understanding of the same expression which can give rise to disputes. In such circumstances, the written form of foreign trade English takes priority over the spoken form. Thus, for most transactions spoken activities are generally accompanied with written ones. Therefore, this paper is devoted to the written English for international trade. Besides, the author considers that foreign trade English belong to a variety of English for special purpose, and has its unique context, therefore, analyzing foreign trade English based on the register theory of functional grammar is more properly.This dissertation is based on the analysis on the book of BUSINESS CORRESPONDENCE AND DIALOGUES written by Qi Yunfang. The author has studied the book carefully and selected 40 letters at random to have an analysis with the statistics method, and analyzed these letters with the theory of register and summarized the writing skills of foreign trade English from there aspects i.e the lexical level, the syntactical level and the textual level.Because of the lack of time the author has not collected more material, and the analysis is limited to the body part of a foreign trade letter. Although this dissertation has some shortcomings, the author has managed to summarize the writing skills of foreign trade English, with the hope to help those who are learning and using FTE.