A Practice Report On C-E Translation Of Building Project Construction Contract

Along with the breathtaking advancement of economy and global merger, construction contract has been playing an increasingly important role in transnational trade and standardization of construction market order. Hence, the significance of translation quality of construction contract in international economic trade is more salient than before. And the construction contract translation conducted via discourse translation approaches of cohesion theory ensures the fidelity and style of the original text, providing a completely new perspective for the study on construction contract translation and offering it theoretical and pragmatic guidance.The thesis is carried out under the guidance of cohesion theory initiated by Halliday and Hasan. As an indispensable device for connecting the linguistic units and implying the logic relations, cohesion is of great significance for the whole discourse construction. In Cohesion in English, it's pointed out by Halliday and Hasan(1976) that cohesion devices can be divided into two categories mainly:(1) grammatical cohesion, in which devices of reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction are included;(2) lexical cohesion, which consists of repetition, synonymy/antonymy, hyponymy/ meronymy and collocation.On the premise of keeping the preciseness and standardization of text and via the elaboration of construction contract translation from perspectives of grammatical and lexical cohesion, the thesis attempts to achieve the following aims:(1) Chinese emphasizes parataxis, since the grammatical features are not obvious in text and the discourse uniformity is always retained through lexical and semantic approaches; however, English is a hypotaxis language of rigid grammatical structures. Hence, while conducting C-E translation, the cohesive objects in discourse must be assorted clearly to realize the optimal cohesion of translated text. And grammatical and lexical cohesion devices can resolve this protruding problem: via the devices of reference, substitution and ellipsis, etc. of grammatical cohesion, the bridge between Chinese and English is constructed and the gaps between two languages is also narrowed down; and through repetition, synonymy/ antonymy, hyponymy/ meronymy and collocation, the intervals between two languages will be rid of and this approach also conforms to the translation criterion of construction contract;(2) Meanwhile, the language expression of construction contract is different from other texts and in order to reach the precise and complete information delivery of contract contents, translator needs to utilize various translation strategies to reach the maximum equivalence between two languages. Since it's a common situation that no corresponding English expression can be found to represent meanings of the extensively-used terminologies in construction contract of Chinese version, hence, the grammatical and lexical cohesion devices can realize this goal to a large extent;(3) Lastly, discourse is the largest meaning expressing unit, which determines that the understandings of lexical and grammatical meaning and the whole discourse meaning must be attached with equal importance in the translation process. Cohesion, as the primary standard for defining discourse, is the key hinge for discourse meaning comprehension. With the mutual attributions of the cohesion features of two languages, the translation quality will surely be improved.This practice report mainly probes into cohesive devices and its applications to the translation of construction contract. After translation, the translation process and case study of translated text are successively elaborated in the thesis, especially for some typical sample sentences; in translation, different cohesive devices and strategies are optimally adopted for specific vocabulary and sentence translation so as to realize the perfection of translating effectiveness. This practical report indicates that a good mastery of the textual features of construction contract as well as its lexical and syntactical genres, the comprehensive knowledge of cohesion theory and proficiency in applying the cohesive devices are one of the most effective and indispensable approaches for realizing the qualified C-E translation of construction contract.