A Comparative Study Of The Two Chinese Translations Of The Protocol On The Accession Of The People's Republic Of China (to The WTO)

The title of this thesis is "A Comparative Study of the Two Chinese Translations of the Protocol on the Accession of the People's Republic of China (to the WTO)". The author aims to compare the two Chinese translations which once caused a considerable disturbance in Chinese translation and publishing circles and to evaluate them impartially. She explores the criterion for evaluating the legal translations, focuses on differences between the two versions in terms of meaning and style, and verifies the differences by utilizing the uniform criterion.There are a lot of expositions of translation criteria, both in China and foreign countries. The author adopts Nida's theory of "receptors' response" as the basic theoretical tool to evaluate the two Chinese translations. The theory of "receptors' response" shares much in common with those traditional theories of translation criteria or principles, but it absorbs the developments of modern linguistics, communication theory, etc. and shifts the focus from the comparison between source text and translated text to the comparison between source-text readers' response and translated-text readers' response, so it can provide more dynamic theoretical framework to evaluate the quality of a translation. However, this author, during her study, finds that the theory of "receptors' response" lacks applicability, because on the one hand, it is often very difficult to determine how the original readers comprehend the text, and on the other hand, it is frequently impossible to evaluate effectively the responses of those who read a translated text. And so she has to modify the theory of "receptors' response" by introducing a bilingual critic into the evaluating process who plays the double roles of the source-text reader and the translated-text reader. When the bilingual critic (the translated-text reader) understands and appreciates the translated text in essentially the same manner and to the same degree as he (the source-text reader) does, such a translation can be regarded as an adequate translation, otherwise an inadequate or even improper one.However, what the author is facing is two translations (version 1 and version 2) of the same source text and she is to make a comparative study of the two versions, so the theory of "receptors' response" needs further modification. In addition to reading the source text, the bilingual critic needs to read version 1 and version 2 and to obtain the understandings and appreciation of them respectively. The bilingual critic's comparison between version 1 and version 2 is actually the comparison between his understandings and appreciation of version 1 and those of version 2. The evaluation of the two versions ultimately depends on his understandings and appreciation of the source text. And in light of his response to the source text, the critic compares his response to version 1 with that to version 2 and tells which version (version 1 or version 2) is more adequate translation in terms of meaning and style.After the comparative study, the author concludes that both Beijing's version and Shanghai's version can be regarded as adequate translations, and each has its own merits and demerits. Chinese is not the working language of the WTO and Chinese translations have no legal binding force and are only for reference of Chinese readers, so any translation that can adequately serve this purpose should be regarded as acceptable.