A Study On The Translation Of Chinese Auction Documents

Currently, although many enterprises have gradually recovered from the 2008 financial crisis, they are still confronted with many challenges, and the development of new industries would be the solution to such problems. The auction industry, as one of the emerging industry leaders, plays a pivotal position in the global economic recovery. China, the biggest developing country, has 140-year history of auction, whereas the translation research about professional auction documents remains blank. It will seriously impede the Chinese economic recovery in a sense.In the light of theories of functional equivalence, this paper is a study on the translation of Chinese professional auction documents. Based on collected data, this paper consists of four parts. The first part illustrates that auction originated in Europe and that with the development in economy and advance in living standards, the auction language modes changes a lot, the style changed from shorter expressions to wordy expressions and then concise ones until complete ones today. The second part illustrates that the language differences do exist in English and Chinese professional auction documents, such as lexicon, syntax and logic. English auction documents tend to use nouns, passive sentences and conjunctions to make the sentences clear and logically, however, in Chinese auction documents, the word-class is relatively more flexible, and active sentences and punctuation have been used more frequently. The third part illustrates that the auction documents belong to the legal papers which are supposed to be precise, unambiguous, easy to understand. Thus, the author puts forward four basic principles of translating Chinese auction documents:professionalness, preciseness, consistency and accuracy. The forth part illustrates that there do exist many hidden culture differences between Chinese and English auction documents, nonetheless, functional equivalence method can solve such problems without changing the original meaning. Therefore, functional equivalence method is put forward to make the translations more accurate and perfect.