| Since China entered WTO in 2002, an increasing number of international economic and business activities have been going on between China and foreign countries; more and more transnational companies have set up their branches in China; more and more domestic companies are listed in international exchange centers; and various forms of international cooperation have increased substantially. All of these business activities are regulated by their Articles of Association. Thus, translation of Articles of Association has accounted for a larger and larger proportion in the field of translation. With a stylized structure, Articles of Association uses legal language, resulting in difficulties in understanding and translation. There are many systematic and comprehensive studies on legal translation. However, the studies on a specific category, such as Articles of Association, Prospectus, tenders or technology transfer, are few. The study on a specific category may serve as a useful guidance for a beginner who wants to step into legal translation as a career.This thesis is based on the author’s experience of translating a project—Articles of Association of a company registered in Hong Kong under the guidance of Skopos Theory. The thesis contains five parts. The first is Introduction, which is an overview of the whole thesis. Chapter One is chiefly concerned with the background, the purpose and significance and preparation about the project. Chapter Two concerns the characteristics of Articles of Association, which shares four semantic features of legal documents:preciseness, formalness, impersonality and conservatism. In specific sense, these features are embodied in the level of lexicon and sentence. Chapter Three is related to the difficulties in the translation process and techniques or strategies adopted to deal with these problems; besides solutions learnt from or recommended by other translators, the author also puts forward some of her approaches. The last part is Conclusion, where the experience, advice and unsolved problems in this translation project are summarized. |
