A Research On The C-E Translation Of The Contract Law From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

As China intensifies exchanges with other countries in the world in politics,economics,and culture under the context of “Belt and Road” initiative,China is experiencing an age that many other counties feel imperative to know China more than ever before.Tremendous achievements that China made in the past several years in political reform,legal construction,culture promotion,and etc.,including documents on laws and regulations as promulgated by the Chinese government,need to be translated into foreign languages for mutual benefit and multi-labial communication.The present thesis takes the Chinese version as well as two versions of the English translation of The Contract Law of the People's Republic of China as its research subject:one being the version published by China Legal Publishing House,and the other Founding Publishing Press.After systematic analyzing the stylistic features of the original at lexical,syntactic,and textural level,based on contrastive study the researcher examined to which degree the English version represented such features of the original,and explored which factors exerted impact on the representation of such features of the original in the target text.With reference to the three Skopos rules as proposed in the Skopos theory,the researcher focused her attention on exploring the strategies for as well as practical techniques of representing the stylistic features of the original,in the hope of paving a theoretical bases for the Chinese-English translation of legal documents with the same text typology as the original.Typological analyses indicate that,like similar legal documents,“The Contract Law” tends to use abound archaic words,couplet words,loan words at lexical level,choose long complex sentences to clarify terms and conditions,responsibilities and obligations at syntactic level,and to use internal cohesive devices to make the contract an integrated whole.More importantly,the morphological and semantic relations of the overall Chinese version seem to be “implicit” whereas those of the English version“explicit”.Such an observation is of great importance to the Chinese-English translation of legal documents,and is worthy of intensive research.The present thesis intends toexplore potential strategies for as well as practical approaches to flexible conversion between stylistic implicitness and explicitness of the ST and TT under guidance of Skopos rules.The present research proves that,under the guidance of Skopos rule,coherence rule,and fidelity rule,stylistically implicit features of the Chinese version of legal documents could be translated into stylistically explicit features of the target version through amplification,nominalization,conversion of cohesive devices,and syntactic restructuring,etc.,so to make the target version is equivalent to the original version semantically and legally.