A Practice Report On The E-C Translation Of Contracts Under The Guidance Of The Register Theory

With the deepening of globalization,trade activities among countries increase accordingly.As a fundamental legal document to guarantee rights and responsibilities,the contract is of great importance in cooperation.If languages held by the parties to a contract are different,then the contract has to be translated into Chinese for the reference of the Chinese party when it is provided by a foreign party.Therefore,high-quality translation of contracts is of great social demand.The present report,based on the English-Chinese contract translation practice,analyzes the representative problems in practice,discusses the text feature of contracts under the three dimensions of the register theory,and provides the corresponding translation strategies with the guiding concept of register equivalence.Register theory suggests that language is influenced by three dimensions: field,tenor and mode.The contract,as a written document(mode)concluded by equal civil subjects(tenor)for the purpose of achieving certain transaction(field),mainly has the following characteristics from the perspective of the register theory: the diction is formal and professional;the sentences are formal,and concise in expression;and the discourse has strong cohesion,and uniform style and wording.When translating English contracts,a translator should make sure the features of targeted text are in consistence with those of the original text in order to achieve register equivalence.To this end,the following strategies can be applied:(1)solemn classical Chinese,exclusive contract terms and terminologies commonly used in relevant fields are adopted to avoid improper translation of archaic words,amphibious words and terminologies;(2)accurate reflection of mood and deletion of redundant parts are used to solve the syntactic problems including loss of appropriate mood,and lack of conciseness in sentence structure;and(3)substitution and coordination in part of speech and style are adopted to tackle textual difficulties including lack of cohesion and coherence.The analysis of present report furthers the study of the register theory in translation and will be of value in the future research and practice of the translation of contracts.