A Study Of English Business Contracts Translation-From The Perspective Of Register Theory

Along with China's further reforms and opening-up to the outside world,China's foreign trade becomes more and more buoyant.Business English has become a language tool indispensible in current international economic activities.As a major means of transacting business,business contract is widely used and attracting more and more attention of researchers.However,the status quo of business contract translation is not satisfactory.The past research about this field is mostly vague,impressionistic and lacking in analytic depth.The present situation of business contract translation is characterized by a mass of uncoordinated statements which do not go beyond the limits of empirical deliberation or essayistic aphorisms.There are some typical problems which exist in business contract translation,such as improper choice of style,mixture of bookish and colloquial words,wrong translation,failure to translate,etc.business contracts,concerning multitudinous professions and many aspects of economics and trade services,involve various types,different formulas and colorful language characteristics which entail in-depth research undoubtedly.Therefore,the research into translation of English business contracts has not only theoretical but also practical significance.Based on systemic functional linguistics,this study applies Register Theory formulated by Halliday to translation practice to discuss the register correspondences in business contract translation from the dimensions of field,tenor and mode,and how to achieve equivalence in ideational,interpersonal and textual meanings of register. Language will vary with its change of function,according to Systemic Functional Linguistics,and this kind of language anomalous form which differentiates by function is register."Register consists of various situational features - especially those related to field,tenor and mode." That is,the situational factors of linguistic features can be summarized as three variables:field,tenor and mode.Field refers to the matter occurring currently,including context,conversation topic as well as participation into the whole activity such as politics,technology,family and etc.Tenor refers to the role relationship between participants,including their social status,attitudes and intended purpose which manifests as the degree of language formality in discourse.Mode refers to the communicative channel of language as well as the function it intends to achieve including rhetoric way which can be classified as written,oral,formal,informal etc. Halliday analyzed context through the actual process of language usage,because these three factors are interrelated.Halliday also holds that the three variables of register decide three parts of meaning system:ideational meaning,communicative meaning and textual meaning. Based on this meaning system,we can directly analyze anomalous form of discourse from the perspective of context,then directly relate it to the nature of language system, thus revealing the in-depth meaning of language.Therefore we can conclude:in the actual usage of language,people must grasp the three aspects of register.Only by doing this can they accurately use language to achieve the intended purpose of communication.By analyzing the Chinese translation of some texts of business contract from phonological,lexical,syntactic and textual dimensions,we conclude some tentative principles guiding the translation of business contract.First,establish ideational equivalence in the field;Second,interpersonal meaning in the translation should be the same as that in the source text;Third,reach the equivalence of contextual meaning.In short,the translation should replicate the register features of the source text to achieve the register equivalence.