Strategic Analysis of English-to-Chinese Business Contract Translation: A Theoretic Perspective of Newmark''s Communicative Translation

• Main Authors: Shuo-yi Shih, 史碩怡
• Other Authors: Shih Chung-ling
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/9gut5j

碩士 === 國立高雄第一科技大學 === 應用英語系口筆譯碩士班 === 104 === English business contracts are important tools in business transactions across borders or between the companies in different countries. However, they are also highly specialized genre that has an unique writing style and uses expression derived from the fields of law and others. From my working experience as an editor in a translation company, I notice that the special characteristics of English business contracts cause obstacles to the translators. Thus, to reduce the challenge of business contract translation, this study aims at providing a simple but comprehensive translation approach that the translators may follow when they translate business contracts from English to Chinese. First, four English business contracts with the topics that are most commonly seen in the real market are selected and translated by me. Second, based on the text typology theories proposed by Bühler and Newmark, contracts are defined as the text type with the primary vocative function and the secondary informative function, and therefore Newmark’s communicative translation approach is applied to complete my translation. Third, the translations of four selected contracts are analyzed to identify some principles and strategies for translating contracts at the lexical and syntactic levels. The strategies are often closely related to the specific features of English business contracts. The results of the study show that the four principles at the lexical level include the use of fixed translation for legal and industry terms, explication of defined terms, reduction of the wordy segments and change of the word class of some words. The other four principles include change of passive voice, conversion of negative into/from affirmative expression, shift of post-noun modifiers to pre-noun modifiers, and rearrangement of the original word sequence at the syntactic level. Additionally, the translation strategies of literal translation, recognized translation, explication, reduction, transposition, modulation and shift are applied to make the translations comply with the conventional verbal presentation of the target language. By analyzing the translation strategies from the perspective of Newmark’s communicative translation, this thesis proposes a holistic approach to business contract translation based on the eight principles and some strategies I have identified from my own translations of four business contracts. Overall, this thesis has taken on some practical significance that future legal translation can use my recommended holistic approach to make the translation meet the expectation of the target audience. Additionally, this approach can be applied to the translation of other types of legal documents with the same function of effective communication.