A Study On The Characteristics Of English Contract And Its Chinese Translation Method

Based on the study of book copyright contracts, the significance and purpose of translation are firstly introduced in this paper and then from the content of contract, the basic terms, language characteristics and text structure are described so as to know well this kind of text and also prepare myself mentally to understand the details and choose reasonable Chinese tone for translation. Meanwhile, this paper chooses Newmark’s semantic and communicative translations theory to support the copyright contracts’ translation and it approved that the theory has proper guiding role for this practice. Then the preparing work before translation is introduced including searching for and reading a lot of similar parallel texts, collecting technical terms of law and publishing industry and making literature review and surfing on the internet to know more about copyright and assignment right. This step with great importance has done much help to the term translation in this practice.Second, this paper mainly emphasizes the translation process. From listing the difficulties such as the classification and application of terms, the meaning transfer from common words to legal words and the prepositions translation and so on, the paper discusses the translation method and strategy in terms of legal words, certain phrases and sentences, standardized sentences with law logic and sentences with inanimate subjects. And the last step is to revise the translation.Finally, this paper concludes with lessons and experiences and those imperfections during this translation practice. The translator realized that understanding the copyright contract is the first step and also an effective method of doing good translation. And analyzing the text characteristics and structure is helpful in choosing translation method. Those polysemy expressions will have some references for later similar translation. Apart from the discussion in terms of micro level, this paper also discusses translation strategy from macro level. For example, we should also pay attention to the integrity of one contract in order to grasp the keynote and form of the final translation. What’s more, on the premise of guaranting accuracy and loyalty the translator can adopt vauge language as a kind of translation strategy to deal with negative expressions in the source language so as to protect the client’s profit as much as possible.Besides, a lack of systematic learning of the contract draft reminds the translator there are many places that need to be improved.