A Report On The Translation Of An Engineering Contract Of Construction Company A

With the rapid development of construction industry, an increasing number of Chineseconstruction firms are going abroad and competing for international construction projects.Consequently, the translation of engineering contracts is growing rapidly, and the translationproject of this paper arises in this background.This translation project includes two parts: one is construction schedule and progress, theother is quality control. As the two most important parts of the contract, they mainly talkabout the obligations of construction manager, package contractor and the owner as well asthe quality control, the standard of testing and acceptance. We can have a good knowledge ofthe construction schedule and progress, the quality control standard, the proof of the claim orwhether both parties perform their duties or not from the contract, so the two parts are of vitalimportance.The author is commissioned by one party of the contract and the requirements of thetranslation are as follows: the first one is that the translation should be so accurate that it canshow the rights and obligations, the second one is that the language should be concise and thewording should be precise, the third one is that the translation should be complete and clearwithout omission.The source text is a legal document which is observed by both parties of the contract.Therefore, the translation should convey the authority of the contract language. If thetranslation fails to convey the correct or precise meaning, it will give rise to unnecessarydisputes. Here, the author tries to choose formal words, expecting the result that both partieshave no question to the wording of the contract. On the basis of analyzing the text type andthe language features, the author translates the contract under the guidance of the communicative translation theory proposed by Peter Newmark. Semantic translation refers tothat the translation attempts to render the meaning of the source text as precise as possible ifthe semantic and syntactic structures of the target language allow, while communicativetranslation means that the translation attempts to produce an effect on the readers as close aspossible to that obtained on the readers of the original. The author combines the semantictranslation and communicative translation, aiming at rendering the translation faithful to thesource text and natural to the readers.