Report On The Translation Of The Cooperation Agreement For Merchants Using The ICBC E-Commerce Platform

The present effort is a report on a legal translation project which the author has completed by way of describing the whole translation process and analyzing the typical difficulties and problems that are found in the draft translation of the Cooperation Agreement for Merchants Using the ICBC E-Commerce Platform.Content-wise,an e-commerce related contract is different from other types of contract in that it contains very dense legal,banking and business content,and the rights and responsibilities of the parties involved therein are rather complex and detailed aiming to exclude the possibility of being misinterpreted or misused.From the linguistic and translational perspective,the source text is full of legal and business terms and jargon,special sentence patterns and paragraphing styles.It is both the legal,banking and business content,the legal language and lack of awareness of the relevant professional requirements that constitute the greatest amount of difficulty and the greatest number of errors in the understanding of the source text and the representation of its content in English which is the target language in this task.It is these elements that make legal translation,of which contract translation is a component,a special field whose practitioners must be trained to qualify for this type of jobs.In order to accomplish the task up to the professionally acceptable quality,I have not only studied its legal,business and linguistic features and conducted comparative legal research,but referred to as parallel texts the three language versions of English,Chinese and Spanish of the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods(CISG)and UNCITRAL Model Law on Electronic Commerce with Guide to Enactment(1996),the Chinese and English versions of the Contract Law of the People's Republic of China and other relevant references.On top of the abovementioned academic and logistic preparations,during the translation,I have also taken the Spanish version of the contract as parallel text and cited some Spanish examples in the case study.The linguistic and translation problems discussed in the case study mainly include consistency and identity,accuracy and precision,professionalism,formal expressions and modal verbs.This report is expected to contribute to a better understanding of e-commerce related contracts and their translation and to help me and other translators to improve the quality of contract translation and avoid committing such errors as presented in this report.