On Stylistic Equivalence In Translating International Commercial Contracts: A Functional Stylistics Perspective

With the globalization of economy and especially with China's entrance into WTO, business and trade exchanges between China and foreign countries have increased enormously. As a legally binding document, international commercial contracts unambiguously stipulate the obligations to be performed by the contracting parties and at the meantime protect the lawful rights and interests of the parties concerned, which helps to promote international business and trade. Thus the translation of international commercial contracts plays a more and more important role in international business and trade exchanges and the study of it has become very important and practical. Many scholars have conducted researches into this domain from various perspectives and they also proposed numerous translating skills and principles. Nevertheless, these researches have some deficiencies. First, these researches lack of systematic theoretical support. Second, although some scholars have probed into translating the stylistic features of international commercial contracts, they mainly build their researches on the basis of lexical and grammatical levels. Few of them have conducted their translation researches from the perspective of the functions of international commercial contracts. Therefore, the author holds that it is necessary to have a systematic study of stylistic equivalence in translating international commercial contracts from the perspective of function.Functional Stylistics constitutes one of the main schools in stylistic theory, and it plays an increasingly important role in modern stylistic study. With Systemic Functional Grammar as its theoretical basis, Functional Stylistics provides an instrumental approach to interpret and reveal the stylistic features of language varieties. Functional Stylistics holds that all languages are the combination of three metafunctions and style is deemed as foregrounding, i.e. motivated prominence. And the ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function are the three dimensions of functional styles. If all the three metafunctions of the source text (ST) are completely transferred into the target text (TT), then the translation can be deemed as an ideal one. However, due to linguistic differences between Chinese and English it is sometimes of difficulty to fully transfer the three metafunctions simutaneously. In such case, the translator should flexibly shift his translating focus according to the most prominent metafunctions and make some adjustments in order to make the translation conform to the linguistic conventions of the target language (TL). The more metafunctions are transferred from the ST to the TT, the more successful the translation will be.On the basis of Functional Stylistics, the present thesis attempts to probe into stylistic equivalence in translating international commercial contracts. This thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter one is the general introduction in which the research background, the objectives and the organization of the present thesis are made clear. Chapter two is a brief survey about the definition, classification and the significance of the translation of international commercial contracts. Chapter three gives a literature review about Functional Stylistics and explains the importance of stylistic analysis in translation. In Chapter four the author first redefines stylistic equivalence on the basis of previous studies on stylistic equivalence and in combination with related researches on Functional Stylistics, then expounds how to attain stylistic equivalence based on Halliday's Functional Stylistics theoretical framework. In Chapter five the author applies the three metafunctions theory in Functional Stylistics to a practical analysis of stylistic equivalence in translating international commercial contracts. Chapter six is the conclusion in which the author indicates the main findings and the limitations of the thesis and then proposes some recommendations for further study in this field.