A Report On The E-C Translation Of Shareholders’ Agreement(Excerpts)

The source text of this translation report puts the spotlight on an English agreement of a foreign company CC after its acquisition of the shares of a domestic company RS.This agreement clarifies the rights and obligations of the company’s shareholders,as well as the performance period and conditions.It has the linguistic characteristics of a legal text.At lexical level,formal words,terminologies,archaic words,and synonyms are used to embody the solemn,normative,and authoritative characteristics of legal texts.At syntactic level,declarative sentences,conditional sentences,passive voice and long sentences are frequently used to reflect the preciseness and formalization of legal texts.At textual level,the formal specification and logic are strict.Guided by Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory,this report discusses the techniques and methods used in translating the shareholders’ agreement into Chinese and strives to achieve functional equivalence between the source text and the translated text at lexical,syntactic,and textual levels.During the translation,the author mainly achieves lexical equivalence through the use of literal translation,omission,addition,and diction;syntactic equivalence by using division,part-of-speech conversion,inversion,and reorganization;and textual equivalence by using substitution and conjunction.Through this translation practice,it can be seen that the Functional Equivalence Theory has a guiding significance for the improvement of legal texts translation.As the translation of shareholders’ agreement is a special subject,in the actual translation process,its elegance in form may be sacrificed,but the content should be kept accurate and rigorous,and the style should be solemn and standardized so as to ensure that the translated text has the same legal effect as the source text,and the communication purpose of the agreement is achieved.It is hoped that the translation methods and techniques summarized in this report can provide reference for the translation of legal texts.