E-C Translation Of Business Contract Guided By The Functionalist Translation Theory

With the development of the economic globalization and China’s deepening and widening of its reform and opening-up policy, especially after China entered into WTO, business transactions between China and the foreign countries as well as China’s export amount have increased enormously. Chinese goods are sold far away to every corner of the world. In the international economic activities, business contracts play an increasingly essential role; and the business contracts translation also plays a more and more important role in international business activities. And therefore it is necessary to study business contract translation. The purpose of the English-Chinese translation of business contracts is to translate a business contract from English into Chinese while ensuring that the translation should have the same effect on the target readers as that of the original text upon the original text readers.Business contract translation, as one of the subordinate parts of the applied and practical translation, has been studied from many different perspectives such as stylistics, systemic functional grammar and functional equivalence theory. Many translation methods, translation principles and translation strategies have been put forward to guide the translation practice of business contracts. However, the status quo of business contract translation is not satisfactory. There are some typical problems that exist in business contract translation, such as improper choice of style, mechanical translation, etc. Moreover, in practice, some business contracts are translated inaccurately, unprofessionally and even wrongly. So the study of business contract translation is not only of theoretical significance but also of practical significance.This thesis will study the business contracts translation from the perspective of German functionalist translation theory. The distinguishing feature from the other related papers is that the writer uses one type of business contracts——purchase contract as the basic target. Through studying the features of the purchase contract at lexical, syntactic and textual levels, the writer summarizes the language features of business contracts. Then the core concepts of German functionalist translation theory are analyzed at macro and micro levels. In the end, the writer applies the theory to the translation practice, describes the translation process and sums up the translation strategy of business contracts to testify that the theory is applicable and feasible. At present, functionalist translation theory has been extensively applied in various practical texts such as advertisements, trademarks and film and TV writings, etc. However, there are only few people who have applied this theory to business contract translation, let alone depth and systematic studies. The comparative analysis and example analysis are used in the study of the thesis. Through this study, the writer finds that functionalist translation theory is also fit for the translation of business contracts and can shed light on contract translation.This thesis is structured as follows:Part One is the introduction. In this part the writer gives a brief description of the research background, the significance and objective of the research, and the layout of the thesis.Part Two is the related information of business contracts. This part, first, introduces the definitions of contracts and business contracts as well as the category of business contracts. Then it analyzes the language features of English business contracts at lexical, syntax and textual levels separately.Part Three is the theoretic framework. In this part, the German functionalist translation theory is introduced, which includes its origin, development and the main representative figures. Then the writer discusses the core concepts of this theory from macro and micro aspects. The applications of the functionalist translation theory are also mentioned in this part.Part Four is the main part of this thesis. This part mainly discusses the business contract translation guided by the functionalist translation theory and the translation skills in E-C translation of business contracts. The first half part is a study at the macro level of the preparation work before commencing the contract translation; the second half part is the discussion of business contracts translation at lexical, syntax and textual levels through the examples of purchase contract. Also the author takes some wrong and inaccurate translations of business contracts as examples and shows the right way to solve them.Part Five is the conclusion. In this part the author makes a conclusion of the whole thesis and some suggestions for the future study and research.In a word, this thesis is to study the E-C business contract translation from a new perspective——functionalist translation theory——to probe into the translation strategies and principles of English business contracts in the hope of providing a general guide for business contract translation both theoretically and practically.