On The C-E Translation Of Commercial Legislative Texts

With the boom of exchange and cooperation between China and the rest of the world, the translation of commercial legislative texts, from Chinese to English, in particular, becomes increasingly necessary and important. Whereas, due to the traditional inattention of the academia both at home and abroad, specialized theoretical researches in commercial legislative translation are still budding. This study, therefore, intends to propose, on the basis of prior literature and the Skopos theory, a systematic and effective set of translation principles and methods for the Chinese-English translation of commercial legislative texts, so as to enhance the translation practice in this domain.Through an evaluation of the official English version of the Maritime Code of the PRC, we find that commercial legislative texts have some unusual features and difficulties, and thus deserve specialized guidance other than the general translation theories. Specifically, such texts are typically loaded with terminology and unique Chinese expressions which have no equivalents in legal English; employ prolonged and complicated sentence structures, subject-less sentences, excessive modifying elements, and yet too less sequence markers than the hypotactic English; and are very formal, professional and precise, making it rather difficult to translate them properly.Therefore, we propose that one should take the guidance of the Skopos theory, abide by such principles as accuracy, idiomaticalness, and concision, and adopt a few specific translation methods, so as to solve these problems and produce good translation works of commercial legislative texts.