On The Translation Of Business Contracts

In the context of globalization, business contracts play an increasingly importantrole in promoting international economic transactions and regulating the market order.Therefore, How to translate business contracts accurately is of vital importance.However, some of the translated business contracts leave much to be desired, such asmistranslation, redundancy and even the omission of necessary information. Inpractice, there have been many cases making a negative impact on internationaleconomic trade.The previous studies on the translation of business contracts were mainly fromthe perspectives of stylistics, register theory, or functional grammar. Few scholarshave ever approached from Peter Newmark’s semantic translation and even fewerhave made systematic structural analysis of the typology, the choice of the words, thesentence of business contracts before attempting the translation of contracts.In view of the above situations, this thesis attempts to apply semantic translationapproach to translate business contracts. First, the text types are analyzed and it isfound that business contracts belong to informative text. Therefore, then the authorapplies semantic translation approach at two levels: lexical level employing technicalterms, archaic words, formal words, modal verbs including “shall”,“may” and “shallnot”, and date and time; syntactic level including complex sentences, adverbialclauses and passive voice. By adopting this approach, this thesis provides a newperspective to study the translation of business contracts and offers both thetheoretical and practical guidance to translate business contracts.