| The contract text,as one of the legal documents,bears the common binding force to the parties,which imposes higher demands on the quality of translation.Any omission in translation or mistranslation,improper wording,or informal style of contract in translation may cause disputes among the parties to the contract,or even commercial blackmail,which violates the law.Therefore,how to improve the accuracy of translation of contracts is particularly important.Current research and analysis at home and abroad focused on the features of vocabulary,syntactic and textual structure of Chinese and English contracts.Many domestic scholars studied and discussed the process of E-C translation of contracts from the perspectives of functional equivalence,linguistics,stylistics,and skopos theory,but few of them made a further study on the process of C-E translation of contracts.German functionalist translation theories include “skopos Theory”,“Coherence Rule”,“Function plus Loyalty” proposed by the functionalist school represented by Hans Vermeer and Nord who provide an effective perspective for the study on C-E translation of contracts.This paper makes an analysis of the text type which contract belongs to,the purpose of the text,and the factors affecting the translation of contracts and the exploration of the applicability of functionalist translation theory to C-E translation of contracts at the macro level.The translation strategies of Chinese contracts are also discussed at the micro-level(lexical,syntactic,and textual aspects),based on the method of comparative analysis.In light of German functionalist theory,it can enable more translators to take into consideration the functionality of contracts in practice at macro level:(1)to fulfill the communicative purpose of the initiators and target readers;(2)to ensure translators to complete the translation project catering for the initiator;(3)to take many factors into account including the initiator,the intended receiver and the role of translators.This dissertation expounds on the common features and the differences of English contracts under the Civil Law System and Common Law System respectively to call on more translators’ attention to the law system of clients or the intended receiver in practice and adopt appropriate translation strategies.The significance lies in that it intends to capture the attention of more scholars and translators to the study of the C-E translation of contracts and effectively ensure more translators to offer high-quality translation of contract texts. |
