A Report On The Translation Of A Distributor Agreement

With the process of globalization and China’s entry into the WTO, the commercial trade between China and other countries has largely increased. In order to ensure the rights and interests of each party, the signing of international commercial contracts between the concerned parties is of great necessity. As most contracts are drafted in English, the translation of international commercial contracts, especially E-C translation is getting more and more important in China. Many translators and researchers have been undertaking the translation practice and academic research in this field. However,the complex sentence structures and unique language style, together with translators’ inadequate professional knowledge and lack of translation competence, make the contract translation a tough work for translators.Under such context, this report, by conducting a real translation project, a distributor agreement translation, intends to locate some typical problems in contract translation and explore feasible solutions to those problems. The selected translation project is a distributor agreement signed by the KCC Company of Republic of Korea and a decorative company of Yantai. The length of the project is about seven thousand words and the time limit is two weeks.In the conducting of this project, translation process has been divided into three procedures. The first procedure is translation preparations, which mainly include making a translation plan and choosing a translation mode. The second procedure is translating process, which consists of the application of CAT tool and the choice of translation strategy. The third procedure is after-translation management, which mainly covers the quality assurance of the translation. By completing this project, three prominent translation problems have been generalized and their solutions provided.Oriented to the problem of lack of appropriateness at lexical level, such solutions are employed as choosing specialized terms, making or referring to a proper glossary, and analyzing the context around. Oriented to the problem of lack of logic and sense at syntactical level, the following solutions are achieved by repeating antecedent,rearranging sentence order, dividing the sentence into meaning groups, and retaining original order of clauses or phrases. Oriented to the problem of lack of coherence at textual level, the corresponding solutions mainly include omitting conjunctions,resorting to CAT tool(SDL Trados) and bringing the translator’s subjectivity into full play.This report will hopefully be meaningful both practically and theoretically.Practically, its findings will serve as a reference for commercial contracts translators,which can help them form a proper translation standard and choose appropriate translating methods so as to work out a successful translation. Theoretically, the report may help to improve the methods or provide a new view in the study of commercial contracts translation.