On Translation Study Of Performative Verbs In English Legal Contracts

China’s foreign trades,especially with US and European countries,have still been on the rise.And it is the signing of trade contracts that bridges foreign trades between countries.The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods(CISG hereafter),a legal document that restrains the contracting parties and a legal basis that settles trade disputes and ensures the legal rights and interests of the parties concerned,is protected by and comes within the jurisdiction of the national laws.However,in the international trade,the contracting parties usually come from different countries using different languages which makes contract translation a key link.Therefore,a correct and an appropriate translation of legal contract plays a critical role in international trade.Performative verbs,as a part of speech act verbs,can play a role in performing the function of locutionary acts,illocutionary acts and perlocutionary acts.And the major function of law lies in that it can integrate and regulate society in which the performative effect can be caused by using performative verbs.Therefore,based on the classification of Austin,Searl,Leech,Thomas and Habermas,this dissertation makes a reclassification of legal performative verbs and selects the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods as a corpus to analyze the translation of performative verbs in legal texts under the assessment of equivalence.This dissertation can be divided into three parts.The first part is chapter one,mainly making a brief introduction to this dissertation including background,rationale and research questions.The second part contains chapter two and three,mainly discussing the literature reviews to the related research and the theoretical framework.The third part is the most important section in this dissertation including chapter four and five.In this part,firstly,a reclassification is made in details;secondly,AntConc3.2.4 is used to select almost all performative verbs appearing in the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods;finally,the analysis of the translation of some frequently used performative verbs is done fromthe perspective of legal effect.Legal translation is an important field in translatology.A qualified legal English translator should not only have a good command of bilingual capacities,but also legal knowledge.What’s more,a combination of theories with practices will contribute to producing a more concise and standardized legal translation.