Case Analysis On Business Contract Translation

This paper aims to explore the approaches to the translation of business contracts, texts of legally binding nature that professional translators frequently deal with in their routine work. A summary and classification of English business contracts, together with an overview of the structure of business contracts and selection of proper translation approaches, are provided in Section I. A list of key contractual clauses and concepts are provided in Section II. As a case in point, a clause extracted from a sales contract is used to further exemplify the suggested translation approaches in Section III. Section IV concludes this paper by suggesting that the prevailing principle for translation of legal texts is to maintain the same legal effect in the target text as in the original, and that the key to faster and better quality translation of such texts lies in more practice, deeper research into the wording of contract texts, and a build-up of legal knowledge.