A Report On Translating Operating Agreement—the Features Of English Business Contracts And The Translation Strategies

This is a report on the translation of Operating Agreement made by and among a Florida limited liability company, another company as a manager or developer and the Investing Members. The agreement serves as a part of the legal documents of the EB-5 project, and is to identify the relationship of interests and obligations between the applicant(as the limited partner) and the general partner, specifying the internal relationship between the project party and the investors.The report introduces the background of the Operating Agreement and the reasons for selecting this text, and describes the whole translation process, including three stages: the pre-translation preparations, schedule and post-translation management. Then it analyses the linguistic features of English business contracts at the level of wording, sentence structure and discourse structure. Based on the above-mentioned features, it uses the static equivalence translation strategy proposed by Li Kexing to analyze and guide the translation of words and sentences in this English contract.This report finds that although legal texts are difficult to understand and translate,there still exists several rules to follow through constant practice. In rendering English business contracts, it is very important for the translator to do pre-translation preparations including searching and reading relevant background materials, parallel texts and references. Then using back-translation tests the quality of final work. In this way, the static equivalence can be achieved in respect of deep meaning, surface meaning, language structure, style and format between the translated text and the original text, and the writing intention of the original text can be reproduced in thetranslated text to the utmost.