Comments On Two English Versions Of The Contract Law Of The P.R.C.

Communicative translation attempts to produce on its readers effects as closely as possible to those obtained on the readers of the original. Semantic translation attempts to render, as closely as the semantic and syntactic structures of the second language allow, the exact contextual meaning of the original. (Newmark, 2001:39) According to Peter Newmark's classification of text functions, legal texts belong to the expressive texts; therefore law translation should adopt semantic approach. The author of this thesis thinks Newmark's translation theory mainly comes from his practice of translating English into another European language and vice versa. If the source language and the target language belong to the same language family, they usually share many characteristics in many respects. In this case, semantic translation should be preferable in law translation. If there are great differences between the source language and the target language, it would be difficult to directly apply his theory to practice. When two languages belong to different language families, semantic translation between them could not be enough.Since Chinese and English belong to completely different language families, they are different in many aspects such as syntactic structure, thinking mode, legal culture. Therefore, mere semantic translation can not fulfil the goal of law translation. The author of the thesis thinks that semantic translation and communicative translation can be supplementary to each other. In the process of law translation translators can first use semantic translation to conform to what is represented in the original text and interpret accurately what is intended to increase its accuracy, which is vital for a successful translation of a legal text.Having successfully interpreted the original text, the translator can use communicative translation to achieve the legal equivalence of the source text and retain the same legal effect. On condition of being faithful to the source text, translators can play an active role during the translation process to achieve the legal effect and ensure the unity of the source text. It seems reasonably safe to conclude that the combination of the semantic and communicative approaches can help translators enhance the readability of the target text. As evidential support to this conclusion, such combination has been widely advocated among law translation researchers and practitioners in recent years.The promulgation and enforcement of the Contract Law of the People's Republic of China plays a significant role in protecting the legitimate rights and interests of parties to contracts and in regulating the social economic order. The purpose of the English version is to popularize the contract law among foreigners. This thesis will adopt Peter Newmark's semantic and communicative translation as the theoretical basis for the analysis of the two English versions of the contract law. One is obtained from www.cclaw.net. (hereinafter V1), and the other is published by China Fangzheng Press. (hereinafter V2)...