The Application Of Additions And Omissions To Legal And Business Translation

With its entry into the WTO, China will involve itself in the world's economy more profoundly and widely. In the contemporary highly legalized society, laws are closely concerned with people's economic activities, thus translation of legal documents becomes increasingly important.Legal document translation has a lot in common with the translation of other documents; however, legal language has its unique stylistic and linguistic features. But there has been an absence of profound and systematic theory typical of legal document translation. It is a pity that skills involved in legal translation are only discussed in general and only few examples are illustrated.Beginning with the analyses of legal language, the thesis intends to discuss the methods employed in legal translation, especially focusing on the application of additions and omissions in legal and business translation. Quite a few examples show that the two techniques play an important role in legal and business translation.The thesis consists of six chapters and a conclusion.Chapter One conducts an investigation of the translation studies. In this part,traditional Chinese translation theories are contrasted with western translationtheories.Chapter Two focuses on the distinguishing features of legal language from the perspective of style and lexicon, on the basis of which the author proposes the criteria in translating f legal documents.In the first part of Chapter Three, the author introduces the redundant information theory which was put forward by Nida and which finds reasons for addition and omission of words in the process of translation. In the next part, close attention is directed to the differences between Chinese and English. Following the overview is the application of the redundant information theory to literary translation.Chapter Four and Five are the most important parts in this thesis. Quite a few examples concerning additions and omissions are elaborated from the perspective of C-E translation. Through analyzing these examples we can reach the conclusion that not only are the techniques widely employed in legal and business translation, but they are the effective means to achieve the closest natural equivalent in translating legal and business documents.Considering the distinguishing differences between Chinese and English, Chapter Six attempts to give a simple look at some examples concerning additions and omissions in the process of E-C translation.The thesis discusses the application of additions and omissions in legal and business translation. Although it cannot contribute much to the establishment of a systematic theory of legal document translation, the thesis is after all a combined trial study of English-Chinese contrastive study and translation of legal and business documents. Legal document translation is a brand new field in China's translation circle and it requires flexible application of various translation techniques; on top of that, it requires language proficiency and consistent scrutiny on the part of a translator. It is the author's sincere hope that the thesis can throw some light on legal document translation and a profound and systematic theory of legal document translation can comes up soon.