A Report On The Translation Of A Trust Agreement

As a new type of wealth management,family trust has attracted increasing attention of trust companies and private banks in China.In the establishment of family trust,trust agreements play an important role.Though trust agreements are always customized based on the needs of clients and differ from one another to varying degree,they share many common features.Thus,the study of trust agreements is helpful for us to catch a glimpse of the well-established family trust system in other countries.On this basis,this report focuses on the translation of a Trust Agreement which is drafted for a Chinese-American according to the laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.As a special type of agreement,the Trust Agreement not only has unique legal concepts and legal terms,but also shares some common characteristics of general agreements,such as frequently-occurring juxtaposed synonyms.In this report,the author attempts to shed some light on the translation of English agreements by analyzing typical challenges and solutions in translating legal concepts and especially in dealing with juxtaposed synonyms.In terms of legal meaning and legal function,juxtaposed synonyms can be divided into two categories: those with more dissimilarities focusing on different meanings and those with more similarities conveying common meaning.Based on the goal of legal translation redefined by Sarcevic,the author proposes adopting the method of unified rendering to juxtaposed synonyms with more similarities,while adopting the method of respective rendering to juxtaposed synonyms with more dissimilarities.