A Functionalist Approach To Translation Of Architectural Contract

During these years, more and more Chinese real estate developers tend to cooperate with foreign design companies. The local design institutes also seek to cooperate with well-known foreign design studios in order to raise their design level. Thus the architectural contract plays a very important role in protecting their legal rights and interests and ensuring successful cooperation. And the architectural contract translation becomes more and more important.This paper attempts to study the translation of architectural contract from macro level, and it includes five chapters.The first chapter is an overview of the contract. It introduces the definition and general features of contract, and then gives a brief explanation of architectural contract’s definition, classification, characters and its importance in modern market.Chapter two introduces the theoretical basis of this paper. Firstly, it summarizes the origin and development of functionalist translation theory, and introduces the representative figures of German school as well as their theories.Chapter three puts theory into practice. Functionalist translation theories are applied in the process of architectural contract translation. Namely this chapter carries out theoretical analysis of architectural contract translation. Firstly the author analyzes the text typology, function, and skopos of architectural contracts from the perspective of functionalist translation theories, pointing out that architectural contracts are not only informative but also prescriptive. However, the prescriptive function is more important. Architectural contracts require that the target text should have the same communicative function as that of the source text. Thus the equifunctional translation of instrumental translation should be used to make target receivers get the same function as that of the source text. In this chapter, the author indicates that every translation task should have a translation brief as the guidance to define the conditions under which the target text should achieve its special function. Later the author gives a translation brief for architectural contract translation. At the end of this chapter, the author uses a large number of examples to prove the applicability of "skopos rule","coherence rule","fidelity rule" and’function plus loyalty rule"In chapter four, the author analyzes the respective language features of Chinese and English architectural contracts from the perspective of traditional stylistics, namely lexical, syntactic and textual levels, and accordingly summarizes the translation strategies to achieve intertextual coherence and intratextual coherence.In chapter five, the author gives a summary of the whole paper. At the end of this paper, the author points out the limitation of this paper because of many scholars’criticism of functionalist theory and the author’s limited professional knowledge about architecture.