A Corpus-based Descriptive Study On The Translation Of Conditionals In International Maritime Conventions

In modern society, shipping has become the most important way in world-wide trades and communications, and maritime conventions play a crucial role in regulating and standardizing maritime activities. As a result, the precise translation of maritime conventions is extraordinarily important and significant for China, as a member state of IMO, to implement the contracted conventions, codes and treaties.As most of the terms are valid only under certain conditions, conditionals are of high frequency in international maritime conventions. In addition, sentences containing conditionals in international maritime conventions are always long and complex. Therefore, the precise translation of conditionals is difficult but important. The thesis is aimed to find some rules and principles in the translation of conditionals in international maritime conventions by applying both quantitative and qualitative methods.The present study applies the research methodology of corpus linguistics. A parallel corpus IMCPARA was built on the basis of 230,000-word text of international maritime conventions with the help of Trados.1,232 sentences of conditionals introduced by 13 conditional subordinators were extracted from IMCPARA by using Perl programs. Combined with translation theory, the following conclusions are reached after quantitative and qualitative analysis:1. The conditionals are widely used in international maritime conventions, accounting for 16.04%of the 7,680 parallel sentences in IMCPARA.2. The distribution of conditionals in international maritime conventions is obtained and if ranks the first in IMCPARA with the percentage of 31.25% of the total conditional subordinators.3. There exist some patterns in the translation of conditionals in international maritime conventions. Every conditional subordinator has fixed Chinese translations. For example, if is mostly translated into "如果,如,......时" in IMCPARA. Most of the Chinese conditional subordinators translated from English conditionals in IMCPARA can be found in the dictionary translations.4. Paratactic translation is not frequently applied in the translation of conditionals in IMCPARA.93.67%of the conditionals in IMCPARA are translated hypotactically, which shows the translation of conditionals in international maritime conventions follows the principle of faithfulness.5. Most of the translation techniques were used in the translation of conditionals in international maritime conventions, such as amplification, conversion, inversion, and negation.