The Error Analysis Of The Chinese Version Of The WTO Agreement

The World Trade Organization (WTO), as the only international organization dealing with the rules of trade between nations, is playing an increasingly important role in the process of economic globalization today. Acceding to WTO conforms to China's fundamental and long-term interests. The WTO legal text are authentic in English, French and Spanish, so the high quality Chinese version of the WTO agreement is urgently needed and will be of great significance to guide businessmen, service -providers and others as well to participate in the international economic and trade activities actively and to guide the officials to formulate polices and make decisions. Meanwhile a high quality translated Chinese version has an important academic value and practical significance in the translation study and in the teaching of translation.By reviewing previous literature, the author of this thesis finds, even though some scholars have studied the improper translation or mistranslation on the unidiomatic Chinese expressions in the Chinese versions of English legal texts, the legal language standardization in the Chinese version has been relatively rarely studied in a systematic, comprehensive and thorough manner in the legal text translation and few has done the research from the perspective of language error analysis.By adopting the key points analysis method, one of the quantitative analysis methods for translation criticism and following the procedure of error analysis (EA) put forward by Pit Corder, namely, collection of errors; identification of errors; description of errors; explanation of errors; evaluation of errors, and guided by the legal translation principle, namely, the preciseness, professionalism, formalness, normativeness, concisenesss, solemnity, the author of this thesis regards the Chinese version of the WTO agreement in the Results of Uruguay Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations as the study object which translated by the International Trade and Economic Affairs Department of Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation of the People's Republic of China. She conducts a thorough study of translation criticism from the perspective of error analysis on the structural and semantic level respectively. 64 errors have been pointed out and corrected which mainly concentrated on structural level in proposed 26 sub-types of errors in such aspects as the misuse of the parts of speech, the improper collocation, the shortage, redundancy and miscellaneousness of the sentence constituent, the confusion of sentence order, the deviation of stylistic and emotional colour and so on.Owing to the stability and universality of the application of the laws and regulations at various levels in a particular state as well as the profoundness of its influence, and widespread inattention to the problems especially in such aspects as language logic, language structure and language style in the legal language standardization in the legislature, judiciary and law enforcement practices and legal text translation practice, the writer of the thesis believes that these problems have to be dealt with by the legislature, judiciary and law enforcement departments in our country, and legal translation personnel should be requested to show due regard in this respect when doing translation.