A Report On Bye-laws’ English-chinese Translation Under The Guidance Of Parallel Texts

Under the Anglo-American law system, the Company Articles of Associationconsists of two documents, namely, memorandum of association and articles ofassociation. Of these two documents, articles of association formulated on the basisof memorandum of association, also known as bye-law, is the regulations of thecompany’s internal matters. As the basis for dealing with company’s internal affairs,the English-Chinese translation of English bye-laws is very important and its quality isdirectly related to the self-governance of the company.Bye-law is a kind of legal text with many features of legal text such as the Englisharchaic words, legal terms, ordinary words with legal significance, passive sentences,parallel structures, long and complicated sentences and special sentences with somewords or phrases occurred frequently in the legal text, etc. These features are themain difficulties in translation of the case text in this thesis and sometimes it isdifficult to translate some words, phrases and sentences in the original English textinto serious and standard Chinese even though the translator analyzes carefully thestructure and each element of the sentence. Bye-law is a kind of highly stylizedlegal text, which shall be developed before the company sets up in accordance withthe Company Law of the People’s Republic of China. Thus, referring to the highlyrelevant and standardized Bye-law parallel texts in English and Chinese versions fromthe Company with the same nature and representativeness compared to that ofwhich company your original text belongs to can not only guarantee the translationquality, but also make up for the defects of lack of expertise of translators. Aftermaking a study of type and text features of the case text, this thesis employedlexically and syntactically the parallel text as the method of English-Chinesetranslation to translate it and received good results.Bye-law plays an important role in the management of company’s internalmatters and, moreover, is a kind of highly stylized text. Therefore, it is one of theeffective methods to translate English bye-laws by referring to the standardizedparallel text which is highly correlated with case text, a kind of highly stylized legal text.