Comments On The Two Chinese Versions Of The Protocol On China's Accession To The WTO

With the acceleration of the economic globalization, WTO is playing a more and more important role in international business. WTO is a rule-based, member-driven organization. All decisions are made by the member governments, and the rules are the outcome of negotiations between members.English, French and Spanish are the official languages of WTO. All the WTO's agreements, which constitute the WTO rules, are written in these languages. These agreements are the legal ground-rules for international commerce. Essentially, they are contracts, guaranteeing member countries important trade rights. They also bind governments to keep their trade policies within the agreed limits to every member's benefit. China's WTO membership is in the fundamental interest of not only its national economy, foreign trade and investment, but also the global economy. China can reap many benefits from the WTO membership, such as using the WTO dispute settlement mechanism to safeguard its economic and trade interests. However, all these cannot run smoothly without good translations of WTO texts. The high quality versions of these legal documents not only have academic significance but also benefit our country economically and socially. In order to wield our rights appropriately and adequately, we should apprehend the related WTO texts thoroughly. Therefore, the translation quality of WTO texts is rather important and it's quite necessary to discuss the E-C translation criteria and Chinese versions of the WTO texts.In this thesis the writer discusses the features of WTO texts and analyzes the two Chinese versions of The Protocol on China's Accession to the WTO in the light of the Chinese traditional translation theory "Xin, Da, Ya" (Faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance) which was put forward by Yan Fu, an outstanding translator in China."Xin, Da, Ya", the "three difficulties of translation", have long been taken as the three criteria of translation by Chinese translators. Of the three, however, the "elegance" has caused quite a few academic arguments in the circle of translation. In this paper the writer studies Yan Fu's translation principles and tries to put forward new annotations to "elegance" according to the stylistic features of WTO texts.This thesis is composed of five chapters. Chapter One first treats of the significance and the characteristics of the WTO texts, then the status in quo and problems in WTO text translation. Chapter Two is dedicated to a brief overview of Yan Fu and his views on translation. After that the writer discusses various comments on "Xin, Da, Ya" and the writer's viewpoint on it. Chapter Three conducts a detailed study of the characteristics of WTO texts and its translation criteria. After a comparative study of the similarities and differences between literature translation and WTO text translation in the light of "Xin, Da, Ya", the writer probes into the feasibility of "Xin, Da, Ya" as the criteria of WTO Text translation in detail. Considering the criteria of translation should be definitude and practical, the writer, in this chapter, puts forward new concrete annotation to "Xin, Da, Ya" which are suitable to the WTO text translation. The fourth chapter discusses the two Chinese versions of The Protocol on China's Accession to the WTO mentioned above, evaluating the two Chinese versions in the light of "Xin, Da, Ya". The writer first focuses on the study of whether the two versions are faithful to the original texts in meaning and whether the two Chinese versions have achieved expressiveness, that is, whether the translated texts are intelligible and in accordance with the language rules of the target language. Finally, the writer centers on whether the two Chinese versions have achieved "elegance". In the translation of WTO texts, the style of the target language texts should be in accordance with that of the source language texts. In the last chapter the writer first reviews the above chapters and reaches a conclusion that "Xin, Da, Ya" could be used as the criteria of E-C translation of WTO texts, and then gives a general evaluation of the two Chinese versions of The Protocol on China's Accession to the WTO according to the criteria of "Xin, Da, Ya". Finally, the writer proposes some suggestions concerning the correctness and consistency of the terminology translation in the WTO texts.