Strategies Of Translating Legal Terms In Chinese Contracts

As legally binding agreements that protect the rights and interests of the parties to the agreements,contracts play a very important role in economic activities.With the implementation of the "Belt&Road" initiative,the economic interactions and transactions between China and other countries have become increasingly frequent,triggering a surge in the demand for the translation of Chinese contracts into English.However,due to the differences between Chinese social and legal systems and those of other countries,many Chinese contractual terms simply don't have English equivalents.Moreover,even if some Chinese terms do have their English equivalents,they are often mistranslated because of the translator's limited legal knowledge or inadequate research,thus leading to disputes or losses of the concerned parties.This thesis analyzes the challenges in translating Chinese contractual terms and proposes a number of feasible solutions.It first presents a real property contract(which the author of this thesis translated during his internship at the D Law Firm),then summarizes three types of errors in the initial version of the translation,i.e.semantic errors,neglect of the context and misuse of online resources,and further proposes three corresponding solutions that the author adopted to make the translation better:cross-check,qualitative analysis,and verification through the research of parallel text.Through these evidence-based analysis,this thesis aims to introduce effective and reasonable research methods,especially to translators who lack experience in contract translation,so as to reduce the mistranslation of Chinese contractual terms.