On The Translation Skills Of The Contract Law

Promoting the opening up to the outside world is not only a promise for China’saccession to the WTO, but also an essential requirement to deepen the reforming andopening up strategy. Consumption, investment and exportation have been the majordriving force of China’s economic development, and all these economic activities areinseparable from the Contract Law of the People’s Republic of China. The englishtranslation versions of the Contract Law of the P.R.C are various, which is notconducive to form a unified environment for law application, to eliminate ambiguityabout law understanding and to promote China’s foreign exchange and lawpopularization. Therefore, I select two translation versions of the Contract Law of theP.R.C, one from China Fang Zheng Press, and the other from China Legal SystemPublishing House. I hope, through the comparative study of the two parallel corpustranslation versions, to promote the translation work on the laws and regulations inour country.This paper mainly adopts the methods of comparative analysis, logical analysisand semantic analysis, combining the legal interpretation, reasoning in the ContractLaw and the correlative translation theories in order to discuss translation skills withillustrations of provisions description.This paper is divided into five chapters. The first part is an overview, mainlyintroducing the historical background of enactment of the Contract Law and theimportance of working on this research. The second part focuses on some well-known translation theories and the research development about legal translation in ourcountry; in addition, I also put forward three principles for the legal translation: theunity of lawful and reasonable principle, the unity of professional and conciseprinciple, and the coherent principle. The third part mainly describes thecharacteristics of the english versions from four aspects as the vocabulary,terminology, long sentences and fuzzy language. In the fourth part, I find, through thecomparative study, the two versions may have some defects, such as mistranslation,omission, and misuse of “shall”. Consequently, I put forward some improvementsuggestions to improve the translation. The fifth part mainly focuses on the translationskills of the terminology, long sentences and fuzzy language in the Contract Law. Thetranslation of terminology shall first define the legal system of the target language,and then find the equivalent word which has the same meaning between the sourcelanguage and the target language. The translation of long sentences should follow theorder: structure analysis, elements analysis, integration and sequence. The translationof fuzzy language can use many methods such as literal translation, interpretationtranslation, translation by adding or simplifying words, merging translation etc. In theconclusion part, I reiterate the three principles of translation of the Contract Law, andput forward a summary of the translation skills. At last, I propose that law experts andthe translators should put more emphasis on the research and improvement oftranslation of the Contract Law of the P.R.C.