On The English Translation Of The Company Law Of The People's Republic Of China

This thesis analyzes the English Version of the Company Law of the People's Republic of China released by the Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM Version) under the guidance of Nida's equivalence theory as well as compares the MOFCOM Version with the one published by China Law Press (the Law Press Version), and proposes that loyal conveyance of the original message, or functional equivalence between the translated text and the original text should be the top priority in legal translation. Apart from that, the translated text of legal documents should also reflect stylistic features of legal writing.Legal documents have social functions of their own, namely to guide, regulate and evaluate the conduct of various entities and individuals. Legal effect is the essential element for the realization of the above-mentioned functions of legal documents. The thesis proposes that the translated legal text and the original legal text should have the same legal effect or be equivalent with each other in function; also there are stylistic features of legal language which should be preserved in the translated text. However, in case of contradictions between these two objectives, the form, or the tool of utterance must be changed to achieve equivalence in function, or in legal effect.By analyzing specific texts chosen from different English versions of the Company Law of the People's Republic of China, this thesis makes suggestions for improvement with regard to achieving equivalence between the original text and the translated text both in content and in form. The thesis also points out that the MOFCOM Version of the Company Law of the People's Republic of China, although on the whole loyal to the original text and reflecting stylistic features of legal writing, sometimes misinterprets the legal implications of the original text and sometimes takes an overly rigid approach in preserving sentence structures of the original, and lacks flexibility to make necessary adjustments to make the translated text more in conformity with writing habits of English legal literature. The author holds that Nida's equivalence theory provides guidance to legal translators as to how to compose in legal language a translated text that is equivalent with the original in its legal functions.