A Report On The Translation Of The Fourth Chapter Of Foundations Of Contract Law

Foundations of Contract Law is a legal textbook complied by Richard Craswell and Alan Schwartz,two distinguished jurists of the United States.Taking the stand of economics of law,this book selected dozens of papers from tremendous amounts of writings that were published on the basic theories of contract law within the realm of the United States and then reorganized them into forms similar to the law reports.In this book,almost all the papers selected are based on economic analysis and capable of reflecting the development and evolution of the basic theories in Anglo-American contract law over time.The fourth chapter,"Contract Formation",contains ten papers,in which many basic concepts of contract law,like "offer","promise","promissory estoppel" and "implied contracts",are involved.By taking the patterns of economics,linguistics or traditional civil law theories as the basis for analysis,the papers discussed the issues of how to recognize and enforce the offers and promises in contract formation.This report is based on the English-Chinese translation practice of these papers.In the report,the author,starting from the source text,firstly analyzed the lexical and syntactic features of the text on the thorough understanding of it and then,under the guidance of "functional equivalence",discussed,both lexically and syntactically,the specific translation strategies by cases.At lexical level,transformation of parts of speech is employed to transform nouns and adverbs into adjectives.At syntactic level,recasting is used to divide the long sentences and then reorganize their divisions;transformation for voice is adopted to transform the English passive voices into active ones in Chinese;while inserting is the main strategy to insert the information of the object clauses into the Chinese sentences.Besides,the author also integrated various strategies into the translating process,the linear translation,division and omission for example.In conclusion,the report suggested that certain accumulation of knowledge in law and law theories is the basis for understanding and translating the source text.Besides,translators should put more attention to the equivalence between the source text and the translated text by selecting an appropriate theoretical guidance of translation.On the other hand,familiarity with the common strategies and techniques adopted in translation is important in solving the problems in the translating process.