An Empirical Study On The Translation Process And Strategies Of Long Sentences In English Business Contracts

The present study examines MTI students' translation process and strategies of translating long sentences in English business contracts.It combines empirical studies on the translation process with the translation study of long sentences in legal texts.Triangulation is employed in this study.Think Aloud Protocols(TAPs)assisted by screen recording method(with a software named BB Flashback Pro 5)and questionnaire are applied to collect experimental data.Qualitative and quantitative analysis supplemented by the quality analysis of translated texts are adopted for analyzing those collected data.According to qualitative analysis,in the E-C process of translating long sentences in English business contracts,MTI students encountered three kinds of problems: lexical problem,syntactic problem and rendering problem,among which the syntactic problem was regarded as the most difficult one.In addition,the whole translation process has undergone three stages at the macro level: ST analysis for preliminary translation,syntactic reconstruction and translation inspection.Each stage is presented as different combination patterns of translation strategies at the micro level.Altogether seventeen translation strategies and their five combination patterns are found in this study.According to quantitative analysis,the present study identifies the top three frequently adopted translation strategies: intuition,lexical analysis as well as comparing and selecting.The finding indicates that MTI students tend to cut long sentences into words or phrases in their translation processes.In the translation stage of syntactic reconstruction,cutting,retrieving and modifying are applied with high frequency.Other translation strategies,such as embedding,reversing and splitting,are used for coping with specific syntactic problems.Based on analysis of the quality of translated texts,it finds that translators' translation abilities together with those employed translation aids and combination patterns of translation strategies influence the quality of their translation results.Translators,who are competent in bilingual ability,adopt parallel corpus as a translation aid or repeat combination patterns(especially Pattern 4 and Pattern 5)with high frequency in the translation process,may produce more readable and acceptable translated texts.In conclusion,for the purpose of translating long sentences in English business contracts with high quality,translators should accumulate relative knowledge of legal English and employ scientific translation aids.In addition,for training legal translators,it is important to enhance their abilities of applying translation strategies for syntactic analysis and reconstruction so as to form some more effective translation process patterns.