A Project Report On The English Translation Of Regulations Of Jiangsu Province On Labor Contracts

Choosing the Regulation ofJiangsu Province on Labor Contracts as main project and the Regulation on the Implementation of the Employment Contract Law of the PRC as complimentary text, this report is finished upon revision and conclusion by research into the official versions of these two texts and reference of related materials. It mainly researches into the lexical, syntactic and literary characteristics of legislative texts in both Chinese and English, and makes conclusion of the methods to translating Chinese laws and regulations into English considering the differences between the two languages.This report makes analysis about the difficulties of translating Chinese legislative texts into English and put forward corresponding solutions from the perspective of the language difference between Chinese and English. In the aspect of words and expressions, the laws and regulations always adopt formal terms and specific numbers to display formality, utilize vagueness in expressions to expand coverage and thus crack down crime on maximum level, and different from Chinese which often use verbs and omit connections, English enjoy the habit to adopt nouns and connecting words to maintain strict logic within the sentences, which is the main problem and difficulty in translation. In sentence angle, there are lots of non-subject sentences in Chinese legislative documents, which is contradictory to English habit of maintaining complete components; language in Chinese laws choose active voice for the most time whereas English select passive voice, thus transferring of voice should be also noticed through translation; there are lots of long sentences in both Chinese and English laws and regulations to demonstrate the strictness and preciseness, thus the right understanding is the first step to proper translation, and sentence structure and order should be adjusted to match the target language habit.Overall speaking, legislative texts mostly use declarative and complete sentences and possess high degree authoritativeness. During the translation, the equivalence of the translated message, uniformity of the terms and certain settled translation pattern for always used structures should be well noticed. As the limited capability of the author, this report still need upgrades while the author herself hope it could provide some help for the study of English translation of Chinese legislative texts.