A Study Of C-E Translation Of Notarial Certificates From Perspective Of Functional Equivalence Theory

Notarial certificates refer to the documents issued by the notary public offices inChina to overseas or foreign counties or entities in order to meet the needs of the party(both natural and legal persons) by certifying the effectiveness of the legal acts,documents or facts at home. Foreign-related notarization relates directly to thelegitimate rights and interests of citizens and legal persons in overseas or foreigncounties, and has the legal force, evidence force and execution force, so notarialcertificates are more and more widely used with their quantities and importanceconstantly increasing. Consequently, the translation of notarial certificates becomes aheavier task and how to promote its translation quality has been an inevitable issue.The thesis makes a study of notarial certificates by answering the following twoquestions:(1) what are the differences in linguistic feature between Chinese andEnglish notarial certificates?(2) what translation methods may be adopted to translatenotarial certificates from Chinese into English?The author firstly sums up the features of Chinese and English notarialcertificates based on a large collection of samples and put forward some translationmethods under the guidance of functional equivalence theory and based on thelanguage features. In this thesis, the author uses some of the examples from thetranslation practice to clarify how to apply these methods in detail. Apart from these,the author employs the document analysis approach and descriptive method. From theabove studies, the results below can be reached:1. Features of Chinese notarial certificates.(1) Lexical features: technical terms(legal terminology) are frequently used; the wording is formal and solemn; nouns oftime and location are often used.(2) Syntactical features: the sentence patterns arestylized; short and simple sentences and sentences of active voices are frequently used;(3) Textual features: the text has fixed format and specific logical sequence.2. Features of English notarial certificates.(1) Lexical features: archaic words，big or literary words are often used; prepositional phrases are often used.(2)Syntactical features: long and complicated sentences are often seen; specific sentencepatterns are used for various types of notarial texts; sentences of passive voices areoften used.(3) Textual features: fixed format is followed; the notarial text is organizedwith specific logical sequence in one sentence.3. Methods for translating the notarial certificates from Chinese to English.(1)Lexis: using archaic words; substituting verbs with prepositional phrase s; transliteration and free translation can be used for nouns of location.(2) Syntax:transformation of voices, changing the active voices in Chinese to passive voices inEnglish; word order adjustment; sentence pattern correspondence.(3)Text:synthesization and rearrangement;This thesis on the C-E translation of English notarial certificates study is farfrom enough due to various factors. Therefore, there is a long way to go for thetranslation study of notarial certificates. It is hoped that the methods studied in thisthesis may provide certain references and guidances for the translation of notarialcertificates, helping to protect the legitimate rights and interests of our citizens andlegal persons.