A Report On Chinese-English Translation Of Contract Of Individual Business Applying For Operating Loan On Mortgage Based On Newmark’s Text Typology

With the increase in exchanges between China and foreign countries,the demand for legal translation is rocketing.During the author’s internship,she translated a large number of legal texts on a computer-assisted translation platform.Taking Contract of Individual Business Applying for Operating Loan on Mortgage(hereinafter referred to as “the Loan Contract”)as an example,this report focuses on problem identification,problem analysis and strategies during Chinese-English legal translation,which not only improves the translation ability but also provides a reference for legal translation research and computer-assisted translation development.Commissioned by the Immigration Department of Shanghai Lawtone Translation Company,the translation is used for a client’s immigration application.With 12,337 Chinese words,the contract consists of a main contract,a statement,and a supplementary agreement,stipulating the responsibilities and obligations related to the loan,and the legal consequence of the violation.The translation shall be faithful,accurate,readable,and finished before the deadline.Based on those requirements,in the pre-translation stage,the translator read parallel texts to understand what effect shall be achieved in the target language,and consulted the format requirements and name list provided by the project manager.When translating,besides searching on the internet,she also referred to the Terminology Base and Translation Memory equipped by the platform,which ensured the accuracy of the translation.After translation,she adjusted the format according to the company documents,and proofreaders were responsible for checking quality.Finally,the translation was finished on time and accepted by the client.According to Newmark’s text typology,the source text features both vocative and informative functions,which means translators should be faithful to the source text as well as convey the meaning to target readers.Therefore,semantic translation should be the primary strategy with communicative translation as a supplement.After analyzing the source text,the author identified the following translation difficulties: at the lexical level,due to the difference in legal and economic systems between China and English countries,it is difficult to find equivalents of terminology,and there are certain vague words in legal language whose degree is hard to define;At the syntactic level,run-on sentences,long and complex sentences and non-subject sentences pose an obstacle to understanding.To convey authority and avoid legal loopholes,there are many redundancies and repetitions in discourse and the fixed structure restricts the adjustment.Furthermore,since Chinese is more dependent on context,the logic is implicit.After the practice,the author finds that translators may adopt literal translation,explanation,and generalizing or specifying word meaning when coping with terminology,vagueness,and other lexical features.For run-on sentences,complex sentences,non-subject sentences,and other syntactic features,restructuring,conjunction and preposition,passive voice or adding subjects could be applied.Meanwhile,redundancy and repetition in discourse should be retained to convey the authority of the texts.With the premise of structure unchanged,connectives could be added to emphasize implicit logic.Besides,the author also obtains some suggestions for legal translation through the translation practice.First,computer-assisted translation tools can improve translation efficiency,but excessive reliance on them is not conducive to independent and critical thinking.Second,when coping with legal translation,translators should coordinate semantic translation and communicative translation approaches flexibly.Lastly,since legal translation is a communicative activity,translators should not regard their role as passive and should make adaptions to ensure the accuracy and fluency of translation.