C-E Translation Of Business Contract Guided By The Skopos Theory

With the recovery of international economy and the increase of international trade, China has enhanced its cooperation with other countries. The translation of business contract plays a significant role in the international trade. The quality of business contract translation makes a difference in the interests of contracts' parties and their further cooperation and development. Recently,scholars have studied the translation of business contract from many perspectives such as from the language and culture, stylistics and functional equivalence,on which they reached some achievements. However,most of the scholars only pay attention to the functional equivalence at micro level but neglect the goal and function at macro level. In addition, most of the researches are conducted on E-C translation and the C-E translation is relatively inadequate. As a result, there are still some inaccurate and mechanical translation in business contract. Under this circumstance, the theoretical system of international business translation is still far from perfect,which need qualitative leap.Consequently, this thesis will apply the Skopos Theory to guide the C-E translation of business contract with the international sales contract as examples. Compared with other types of text, business contract is a text with a certain business goal. The Skopos theory make a breakthrough of traditional linguistics and pay more attention to the goal that the text is bound to achieve. According to the Skopos theory, translation is a behavior with a certain goal rather than a simple word-to-word transformation. The Skopos theory regard the Skopos rule as the top-ranking rule. Therefore this thesis will study the C-E translation of business contract from the perspective of Skopos theory.Based on the theoretical basis of Skopos Theory and with the international sales contract as an example, this thesis will prove that Skopos theory can effectively guide the C-E translation of business contracts by using a combination of example-proving method and analytic method.This thesis have made the following findings:(1) in the process of C-E translation of international business contract, except from the language features of business contract at micro levels, the translator should also pay attention to the participants in the translating process,the purpose of the translation and the translating principles at the macro level. (2) the Skopos theory can provide an approach to C-E translation both at macro level so as to reach the goal of the translation and provide a theoretical guide to the C-E translation of international sales contracts.