Bidding Documents Translation:A Functional Stylistic Approach

As the globalization of economy and trade is proceeding at an enormously high speed and on an unprecedentedly large scale, the bidding activity, one important trading method, has been widely adopted in the international trade. It is an inevitable procedure in the procurement of goods, works and services, etc. In accordance with the international practice, bidding documents should be compiled in English especially in international bidding. If other languages are permitted, it is still necessary to prepare English version for reference. Therefore, sufficient attention should be focused on the accurate comprehension and translation of bidding documents to ensure the effective proceeding of bidding activity.Bidding document, one type of legal texts in essence, is legally effective to declare detailed requirements of the project, and regulate the right and obligation of purchaser and potential bidder. Up till now, most of the previous researches focus on the simple summary of linguistic features on the level of lexicon and syntax, common translation mistakes and translating skills. On the one hand, the previous studies centering on the intra-linguistic features were not conducted on a comparatively systematic theoretical support, and on the other hand, the consideration about the outside world factors which influence the translation is still insufficient. For these reasons, it is of great importance to have an in-depth analysis of bidding documents translation systematically from macroscopic to microscopic level.As a salient branch of modern stylistics, functional stylistics is built on the theoretical basis of systemic functional grammar. It provides a fresh approach to comprehend and reveal the stylistic features of language varieties. Brilliant achievements have been attained in the field of literary language analysis, whereas the present thesis is an active attempt to apply this theory in the translation of non-literary text:bidding documents. The functional stylistics, which consists of three-metafunction, multi-strata, foregrounding and context theory, can be viewed as a relatively comprehensive theoretic framework because it both takes the interior dimension of language system as well as the outer cultural and situational factors into consideration. The research materials of this study are mainly quoted from bidding documents of civil engineering projects financed by an influential international bank ADB with full name as Asian Development Bank. The present thesis aims to identify foregrounded stylistic features of bidding documents under the guidance of multi-strata systemic, functional and contextual ideas of functional stylistics, and finally testifies that the complete transfer of all three metafunctions from ST to TT can contribute to achieve an ideal translation.Opposite to the traditional bottom-up analytic procedure, functional stylistics provides a top-down mode through which the analysis starts from the macroscopic contextual dimension of bidding activity and documents, then the consequently activated stylistic features at lexico-grammatical level will be studied systematically. The translator endeavors to achieve the equivalence of three metafunctions and the corresponding sub-systems between ST and TT. The functional stylistics offers a comprehensive and systematic approach to access to the appropriate translation of bidding documents and other legal texts, which will be of much significance both in further development of translation theory and translation practice, especially in the field of legal text.