Translation From The Perspective Of "Function Plus Loyalty"-a Practice Report On The E-C Translation Of IP License Agreements

Along with the trend of globalization, E-C or C-E translation of legal documents, legal contracts in particular, is playing an increasingly significant role in transnational economic exchanges. As an influential form of legal contracts, English intellectual property(short for “IP”) license agreements have their conspicuous features at both lexical and syntactic levels, thus requiring special attention from researchers in this field.As a type of instrumental text, IP license agreements exhibit the following unique linguistic features: 1) at lexical level, common words are endowed with specific legal connotations, and juxtapositions often appear in the texts with frequent use of archaism and modal auxiliaries; 2) at syntactic level, complex sentences and passive voice are applied constantly. It is these above-mentioned features that constitute the difficulties in the E-C translation of IP license agreements.Taking the linguistic features of English IP license agreements into consideration, this report examines the feasibility of applying Christiane Nord’s “Function plus Loyalty” on the E-C translation of IP license agreements and proposes the techniques and strategy which are proper to apply. And it leads to the discovery that, to accommodate the target readers, techniques as follows should and must be applied: 1) equivalence, which indicates directly translating the linguistic structures in the source text into its equivalence at both semantic and syntactic levels in the target language 2) transposition, which is changing the part of speech of certain words or phrases without altering their original meaning 3) amplification, which means adding necessary supplements to the target text to make it authentic and reasonable at both semantic and syntactic levels 4) modulation, that is, changing the point of views in the target text without altering the meaning of the source sentence.