Sentence Structure In E-C Translation Of Legal Contracts

In foreign trade and business exchange,as the framework document,legal contract plays very important roles in stipulating the obligations among parties,which requires high translation quality of legal contracts.Based on Newmark's text-type translation theory and the translation practice of the Subscription Agreement of the Delaware Limited Liability Fundways Company,the author has explored the translation techniques of English legal contracts.In the process of translation,the main problem that the translator encountered is how to deal with various sentence structures in legal contract,including the translation of conditional adverbial clauses,the passive voice sentences,and the long sentences.According to the features of legal document and the author's practical experience,the author came to the following conclusions:(1)Legal contract belongs to the informative text in Newmark's text-type translation theory,the main function of which is to transmit information about legal provision,including the information of legal conditions,legal acts and legal subjects.(2)As there are huge differences between the information structures of English and Chinese,how to organize information structure of the target language in the process of translation is the key problem.(3)The information structure consists of "new information" and "known information".In the translation process,we should place the "new information" and "known information" in a correct order and organize the sentence structure well according to the information structure theory,which can enhance the accuracy of the translation and express the information that the original text conveys.This translation project is a good attempt to translate legal contracts and provides a good example for translation reference.