Study On The Applicability Of The Interpretive Theory In English-Chinese Translation Of International Business Contracts

With the development of economy,international business activities between China and other countries are increasing.Correspondingly,the role of international business contracts has become more and more important.International business contracts provide the rights and obligations of the both parties,the specific procedure of trades and the methods to settle disputes.Thus,they supply a solid legal guarantee for the smooth progress of international trade.As legal contracts,the business contracts have distinctive characteristics in its lexical,syntactic and textual structures,and the contents have a high degree of professionalism,so their translation is a very big challenge to the translators.When translating,the translator should not only be faithful to the original text,but also express the original meaning in an accurate and fluent language.The translation quality of the business contracts directly affects whether the trades are successful between the two countries.Therefore,it is of great practical significance to find out a more applicative translation theory to guide the contract translation.The Interpretive Theory was originated in Paris.At the beginning,it was mainly applied in interpretation.However,with the in-depth studies of many scholars,the theory has been gradually extended to the translation.The Interpretive Theory creatively puts forward three steps in translation process,namely,comprehension,deverbalization,and expression.The Interpretive Theory emphasizes that the translators should make full use of their professional knowledge to understand the original meaning,on the basis of meaning equivalence,use similar language forms to express smoothly.In addition,the theory also upholds three principles in the translation process,namely: sense-equivalence;form-consistency;flexibility.In this view,this thesis attempts to use this theory to guide the contract translation.The thesis mainly contains six parts.The first part mainly introduces the research background,purposes and significance,as well as the structure of this thesis.The second part studies on the Interpretive Theory,the international business contract translation and the Interpretive Theory in international business contract translation at home and abroad.The third part is a general description to the Interpretive Theory,including the historical background,the translation principles and the three steps in translation.The fourth part discusses the knowledge about contracts,including contracts' definition and the linguistic features.This part also digs out the specific criteria for contract translation: faithfulness;smoothness;preciseness.The fifth part,first of all,theoretically proves the applicability of the Interpretive Theory to international business contract translation,and then practically proves the adaptability from three levels,namely: lexical level,syntactic level,and textual level.The sixth part summarizes the findings and limitations.