A Genre-analytic Approach To The Translation Of Business Letters

Business correspondence is pervasive in our economical life. The economic globalization gives birth to business letter translation, and naturally the research on translation of these documents also draws on much attention. The present thesis revisits translation of business letters from a relatively new angle - genre analysis, an important theory of linguistics studies.This paper aims at introducing genre analysis of the systemic functional school to explain some aspects of translation. For a long time, genre analysis has been proven to be effective and fruitful for studying English for Special Purposes (ESP). Consequently, this paper is an attempt to study the translation of business letters which is one kind of ESP from a genre-analytic perspective. The strong conventionality and specific communicative purposes that business letters bear serve as the starting point of the present thesis. That is exactly what genre analysis concerns about a text or discourse. According to Halliday and Hasan, All uses of language have a context which comprises the context of situation and context of culture. As far as genre theory concerns, the context of culture relates to the schematic structure of the text, while the context of situation relates to the realizational patterns of the text.The translation of business letters from the genre-analytic perspective examines how to maintain genre integrity in the target language, concerning two major aspects: its schematic structure and realizational patterns. The author insists that first of all, the structure, instead of being faithful to the source text, should be adjusted to conform to the convention of the target text; in terms of the realization patterns, it stresses the equivalence of function of both texts, namely, the equivalence of ideational meaning, of interpersonal meaning and textual meaning. In the end, it is not the goal of this paper to build any translation theory in relation to discourse analysis; rather, it is to look into detailed analysis for areas where the discourse theory can bring insights into translation.