A Report On Translation Of Two Commercial Insurance Policies

With the emerging market of insurance in China, insurance plays an important role in people’s daily life. This makes the translation of commercial insurance policy much more critical. As a special economic contractual relationship, policies involve the economic interests and benefits between the insurer and the insured and have the force of law. Meanwhile, as a style of application, the policy has gained its own characteristics in terms of vocabulary and syntax. In order to translate commercial insurance policy accurately a translator has to take its special textual features into consideration. Only in this way, can unnecessary economic dispute be avoided.The paper is the report on translation of two commercial insurance policies:Building and Personal Property Coverage Form and Cause of Loss-Special Form.Under the guidance of text typology theory put forward by Peter Newmark, the author tries to make an exploration of translation methods for insurance policy. With these methods, the author is expect to achieve complete equivalence in legal effect of clauses and terms in insurance policies on the one hand; and to make sure the readability of target texts on the other hand. Source texts belong to informative texts, with less personal opinion. Their textual features involve the use of terms and long complex sentences, the comprehension and translation of which are regarded as difficult points.In order to make translation better, the translator looks up terms in advance and receives training about insurance policies from RSP to gain more background knowledge. She also reads bilingual insurance policies as parallel texts for reference. In the translation of long complex sentences, first step is to analyze sentence structures, and then to adopt proper translation methods and skills, such as restructuring, split translation and so on.Through this project, the translator realizes translation should not only focus on words, sentences and paragraph, but also on the expression norms of target texts. In addition, the report tries to combine specific cases with relevant theories and intends to provide reference for fellow translators of commercial insurance policy.