A Study On The Translation Of English Business Contract From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence

The past decades have witnessed great changes in China, especially in its communication with foreign countries in business. Since China adopted the reform and opening-up policy in1978, it has conformed to the trend of economic globalization by opening wider to the outside world and promoting its economic and trade cooperation with other countries on the basis of equality and mutual benefit. In addition, China’s entry into the WTO in2001brings about more opportunities for the businessmen to develop favorable relationship with their partners in foreign countries. These two major events have facilitated China to fasten its foreign trade development. According to the data revealed by National Bureau of Statistics of China, the total volume of China’s export and import trade in2011amounts to3.6421trillion dollars, up22.5%compared with that of last year.Against this background more and more investors and other businessmen pour into China to make better use of the opportunities. When they try to conduct business with Chinese businessmen, the contract is needed for avoidance and easier settlement of any possible disputes. These foreign businessmen may generally go to China offices of international law firms or some trustworthy local law firms for the draft of the contracts which are referred to in this study as English business contracts.The English business contracts have to be translated to Chinese after they are drafted as Chinese party may needs a Chinese version. As English business contracts have their unique features such as its complicated sentences, the translators may find it difficult to understand them, let alone translating it into Chinese if they are lack of rich experiences in this field of translation. Some scholars have devoted themselves to the study of the translation of English business contracts to follow the trend. However, their researches are far from enough as most of their studies focus on the translation skills and strategies but lack of systematically theoretical guidance. In this thesis, the author is trying to study the translation of English business contracts from the perspective of functional equivalence to shed a light in this field.This thesis adopts a qualitative method in the whole study. It firstly probes into various studies on equivalence theory in translation before the discussion of Nida’s functional equivalence theory which has been studied by many scholars at home and abroad in the translation of other texts. The functional equivalence, referred to as dynamic equivalence at the beginning, simply means that the translators shall follow the principle that the relationship between target readers and translated messages should be the same as that between the original readers and Source Texts. Therefore, functional translation sometimes changes the original form but keeps the source language message, because it puts the message in the receptor language.The whole study develops around the translation of English business contracts from the perspective of functional equivalence and can be divided into six chapters as follows:Chapter One is a brief introduction to the whole study stating the rationale and significance of this study and the whole structure of this thesis. China’s entry into the WTO facilitates China’s economic communication with foreign countries and its reform and opening up policy has put it to the world’s stage, which attaches great importance to the translation of English business contracts for better business transaction.Chapter Two reviews the previous study on business contracts and studies on equivalence by various scholars and Nida’s functional equivalence theory which is the focus of this thesis. There have been many researches on equivalence theory. The author finds that Nida’s functional equivalence theory can be adopted as guidance in the translation of English business contracts.Chapter Three puts forward the research questions of this study, explains the research design and methods and how the data in this thesis is collected. This research adopts a qualitative method in analyzing some practical examples and all examples are from published books or authorized websites which make sure that all of them are authentic.Chapter Four probes into the language feature of English business contracts in terms of its lexical, syntactic and stylistic characteristics for the convenience of the study and the readers’better understanding of such documents. In terms of its lexical feature, the English business contracts use more formal words, pairs of synonyms and archaic words compared with other types of texts. In addition, the use of conditional adverbial clauses, long sentences and declarative sentences constitutes its syntactic characteristics. This thesis mainly analyzes the formulization and accuracy of the contracts in terms of its stylistic featureChapter Five introduces how to apply the theory of functional equivalence to the translation of English business contracts in detail taking some special expressions and set clauses as examples, which are frequently seen in most of the English business contracts. Therefore, the familiarity of those set clauses in English business contracts results in the facilitation of the translation of the whole contracts at lastChapter Six is the conclusion of the study and in this chapter the author states the findings and limitations of this study and proposes suggestions for further study in the translation of English business contracts from the perspective of functional equivalence.