A Contrastive Study Of Reference In International Business Contracts And Its Translation

Cohesion theory has become the research subject among the fields of linguistics,pragmatics and translation since the publication of Cohesion in English written byHalliday and Hasan in1976. With the rich study and exploration of this theory inaspects ranging from lexical level to texts, we have seen fruitful reward both at homeand abroad. In recent years, more and more Chinese scholars has conductedcontrastive analysis concerning cohesive devices between English and Chinese withthe view to revealing the similarities and dissimilarities between them. The majorityof these researches, however, either attach great importance to the macroscopicanalysis of the two languages or solely focus on qualitative analysis withoutstatistical support.The present thesis, based on cohesion theory established by Halliday and Hasan,aims to conduct a contrastive analysis of reference in English and Chinese businesscontracts and the appropriate translation strategies. To conduct a quantitative andqualitative study of the three categories of reference,20international businesscontracts are selected, each with English and Chinese versions. The research leads tothe following conclusions: First, the overall usage of referential items in English ismuch more than that in Chinese. In accordance with the frequencies calculated,English referential items occur1203times, while Chinese counterparts only204times. Second, English and Chinese referential items do share certain similarities:(i)Among the personal reference, only third person pronouns are employed in thecorpus in both languages.(ii) Archaic words are frequently used in both languages.(iii) General comparison enjoys higher frequency than particular one. And third, thereare some dissimilarities of reference employed in English and Chinese as well, whichmainly lies in the variety of personal pronouns in English, the existence of thedefinite article “the” and the comparative form of adjectives and adverbs in English.Based on the findings above, certain methods should be applied during the translation process so as to maintain the cohesion of the target texts. The methodsanalyzed in this paper are preservation, substraction, addition and repetition. Theauthor finds that:(i) Referential items including personal pronouns, the selective ones ofdemonstrative reference and general comparative reference are mostly preservedduring the translation process because English and Chinese do share certainsimilarities in terms of reference.(ii) Substraction is the most commonly used method from English to Chinese,especially when it comes to the definite article "the" in English, which mainlybecause English attached great importance to sentence structure while certainreferential items in Chinese are implicit and can be inferred from the context.(iii) Addition is one of the most commonly used strategies during Chinese toEnglish translation for the sake of avoiding either confusion or grammatical mistakesin English versions. However, translators should keep it in mind that addition cannotbe applied at will. It functions merely for the purpose of faithfulness and clearexpression of the original legal documents.(iv) Repetition is mainly applied from English to Chinese when dealing with thesame meaning or action since it is common in English that pronouns are employed,while in Chinese, nominal repetition is the familiar methods.The author hopes that the findings of this study may of some importance interms of facilitating the comprehension and translation of legal documents and tosome extent raise the awareness of both readers and translators of the correct use ofreference in legal language. Meanwhile, it is hoped that this thesis would expand thescope of cohesion theory and serve as a preliminary foundation for morecomprehensive and persuasive studies ahead.