A Study On Translation Principle Requirements For International Business Contracts From The Perspective Of Linguistic Features

With the trend of globalization and especially China’s entering into WTO, China has been in the process of getting a full-scale integration into the world at a higher speed than ever before, with more opportunities to get engaged in foreign exchanges in every field such as education, science and technology, agriculture, and so forth, among which the business activities and trade transactions between China and the outside world have been increasingly growing since the past several decades. When business activities are processed, it becomes an indispensable segment to sign business contracts in order to get the business activities moving much more successfully, as well as to protect both parties’ legal rights and benefits and restrict each other’s behavior.In this thesis, the previous researches on international business contract translation by scholars both in China and abroad are reviewed briefly, which have set a solid foundation for further studies in this field. And the linguistic features of international business contracts are discussed from both the lexical and the syntactic levels, with the analysis of some sample contracts chosen from textbooks concerning the related fields to specify the distinctive words, expressions and sentence structures frequently employed in international business contracts. Additionally, based on the analysis on the general and widely-accepted translation theories raised by scholars and practitioners overseas and at home in different phases, the thesis is intended to put forward the four practical translation principle requirements for international business contracts, analyzing and illustrating the application of these translation principle requirements in combination with large quantities of sentences in example contracts from the perspective of linguistic features, to show the practicality of these translation principle requirements when international business contracts are translated. The aim is to help translators in relative fields get familiarized with the applicability of the five translation principle requirements for international business contracts, in order to improve their translation skills and avoid unnecessary disputes and economic losses caused by misinterpretations, ambiguity of expressions, and even economic losses as much as possible. There are six chapters in this thesis. The first chapter is the introduction, presenting the following points briefly:the research background, the purposes and significance of the research, the questions concerning the research subject, the major methodology as well as the layout of the thesis. Chapter two is the literature review. The part centers on the previous researches on international business contract translation in China and overseas. Chapter three analyzes the linguistic features of international business contract English from both lexical and syntactic levels. Chapter four consists of two parts. The first part is concerned with the general translation theories put forward by scholars both in China and overseas. Based on these translation theories, in the second part, the author raises the four translation principle requirements for international business contracts:preciseness and formality, completeness and logicality, professionalism and objectivity, and coherence and conciseness. Chapter five focuses on the analysis of these four translation principle requirements, and a great number of examples selected from contracts are given to illustrate the application of these translation principle requirements from the perspective of linguistic features of international business contracts. The last chapter summarizes the major findings, the limitations and speculations of further researches in the field of translating international business contracts.