Business Contract Translation In The Light Of "Function Plus Loyalty Principle"

With the strengthening of global economic integration, particularly after the occurrence of the U.S. sub-prime mortgage crisis and debt crisis in Europe, China gains its acceptance as a great power with favorable responsibilities and credits in political, cultural, especially in the economic field. The economics and trades between China and countries all over the world are increasingly fortified. In the meanwhile, the trade disputes and other related issues are becoming more and more prominent due to the cultural differences. As an important legal basis to commence business and safeguard rights and interests of the relevant disputing parties, business contract plays an increasingly important role in the international business activities therewith its precise and rigorous logic, professional and normative expression as well as complete and clear contents, and the accurate, coherent and precise translation can effectively eliminate trade frictions and ensure that the interests of the participants, and thus has now become one of the important topics in the field of translation.Many translators have conducted the analysis from different angles and put forward many constructive translation principles and strategies. However, in the actual translation process, most people ignored the features and the translation purposes of the contract text, the mechanical translation even the uncorrected translations thereby caused a lot of trade disputes and made great economic damages and losses for the disputing parties. Therefore, it should still need to conduct the in-depth study of business contracts translation and strive to provide theoretical guidance for the practical translation.The German functionalist translation theory holds the point that translation is a purposeful behavior; the translator should fully understand the function of source text in the relevant cultural as well as the expected functions in the target culture so as to select the appropriate translation methods, strategies and techniques. On the basis of the skopostheory, the Germany translator and scholar Christiane Nord further proposed the concept of loyalty, and stressed that readers from different cultures focused more on the structure and content of the text itself, the translator should fully understand the intent of the original author and then transfer it correctly in the target language to the target receivers so as to achieve the translation that crossed the cultural differences. Her "function plus loyalty principle" also provided a wholly new point of departure for the research of the thesis.The thesis adopted the quantitative and qualitative research methods, detailed analyzed the lexical, syntactic and discourse structure characteristics of the business contract, combined the purpose and the text functions together, preliminarily investigated the principles of the "function plus loyalty principle" in the business contracts translations and thus put forward some relevant translation skills and strategies like addition, conversion, omission, etc so as to achieve the communicative purpose of the business contract.The analysis of the business contract translation form the perspective of the "function plus loyalty principle" is of great theoretical and practical significance. Theoretically, it further proved the feasibility of the principle; business contract as a specific style should well investigate the cultural differences between the source and target languages, so the thesis can enrich and develop the analysis scale of the principle. Practically, it emphasis more on the subjectivities of the translator and required them to be of cross-culture awareness, favorable professional quality and ethics, take into account of all parties’ benefits so as to promote the smoothness of the business. However, due to the limited capacities of the author and the lack of collected materials, the research should further be conducted in the future.