Translating Business Contracts

Within the field of nonliterary translation, the translation of business contractsconstitutes a significant section. Although it has been developing rapidly in the recentyears together with the whole field of nonliterary translation, it is not without itsweaknesses and inadequacies. In the field of nonliterary translation studies, the study ofbusiness contract translation has been attracting the attention of many scholars and hasgained much in the understanding of the appropriate procedures and methods for it. Atpresent, however, the exploration of business contract translation is still suffering frominadequacy or partiality in its theoretical basis and methodology (e.g., unreasonablepreference of “special” and “new” theories over general and classical ones). In view ofthe current situation of contract translation practice and the problems in the study ofcontract translation, the present report attempts to make a description and analysis of theauthor’s own practice of translating business contracts from English into Chinesethrough the methodology of theory-based case analysis from the perspectives of JiaZhengchuan’s Systemic Procedure of Translation and Peter Newmark’s CorrelativeApproach to Translation, so as to find out its strengths and weaknesses in its proceduresand methods.Firstly, this report provides a description and analysis of the procedures of theauthor’s translation practice within the framework of Jia’s Systemic TranslationProcedure to see whether the procedures are systematic and appropriate. Results of theanalysis show that, in the translation of each of the selected business contracts, theauthor goes through four stages, i.e. pre-translation work, source text analysis, targettext production, and post-translation work. Within each of the four stages, the authorworks in four steps, i.e., overall manipulation, environmental relation, system operation,and process execution. The author performs well in most stages and steps of translationthough not in some steps of certain stages in the translation of some contracts, thusleading to the general success of the translation projects with some minor defects. Secondly, this report carries out a description and analysis of the author’s translationmethods on the basis of Newmark’s Correlative Translation Approach and withreference to his former approach of semantic and communicative translation to see whatmethods are used in what circumstances and whether they are used appropriately inthose cases. Results of the analysis demonstrate that both close or semantic translationand loose or communicative translation are used in the author’s translation practice.When the text fragments is well written in important language or mainly performexpressive functions, more close or semantic translation is used; when the parts of textis not linguistically important or chiefly perform evocative and informative functions,less close or communicative translation is used. There are, however, cases of misuse ofthese methods, which often result in poor or erroneous translation.Hopefully, this report may be valuable both to translation practice and totranslation theory. Practically, its findings may reveal that successful business contracttranslation is guaranteed where the translator follows a systematic and appropriateprocedure and flexibly chooses from or combines close or semantic and loose orcommunicative translation methods according to the language and functions of textfragments in concern. Theoretically, the methodology of the present report may help toimprove the methodology in the description and analysis of business translation practicein particular and nonliterary translation in general.