Lecture №9 translation of official documents

Assignments:

• Read lecture thoroughly

• Highlight the main key points

• Make the summary of the Lecture

In a way translation of official documents is the opposite of literary translation in what concerns the freedom of translator’s actions and choices.

Unlike literary texts of official documents are highly standardized: this applies both to the structure of the whole text (macrostructure) and to the arrangement of individual paragraphs and sentences(microstructure).

At the macro level an official documents usually consists of a preamble, main text body and a finalizing (concluding) part. Depending on the type of documents the composition and content of its individual parts may slightly vary. In modern linguistics standard texts structures intended for information presentation at different language levels are called FRAMES.

A FRAME is understood as a set language structure with changeable elements. The changeable elements within a text frame are called SLOTS. Let us take a preamble to a commercial agreement as an example of a frame.

AGREEMENT

This Agreement is made this_______day of_____, 1999, by and between______,

[a________corporation with its principal office at__________] or [an individual with an office and mailing address at_____________] (“Agent”), and [company name], a corporation organized and existing under the laws of_______________, with its principal place of business at_____________________(_______).[27, c. 165]

Here, in the above frame of an agreement the blank spaces represent the slots to be filled with the SLOT FILLERS (by the date, company names, address etc. in this example).

But a text frame seldom the form of the text with blank spaces. Rather often than not a frame is a standard text with stable and changeable parts, for example:

Intellectual Property Rights

_______by this Agreement does not grant to Agent any rights in or license to______’s trademarks, trade names and service marks. _________reserves all such rights to itself. Agent shall not utilize, without_______’s express, prior and written consent, any____trade or service marks on trade names, and will promptly report to_______any apparent unauthorized use by third parties in the Territory of_______’s trade or service marks or trade names.[27, c.165]

In the above text frame the italicized text fragments are presumed to be changeable depending on the subject and conditions of the Agreement, e.g. “prior and written consent” may be replaced by “oral consent”, etc.

Bearing in mind the standardized and clichéd structures of official documents one may formulate the main translator’s task as follows:

The task of translator translating official documents is to find target language equivalents of the source text frames and use them in translation as standard substitutes, filling the slots with fame fillers in compliance with the document content.

Another important task of a translator translating official documents is to keep to proper matching patterns of lexical and grammatical structures within the frames. To give an example, English forms of Participle 1 in the preamble of some international agreements may be rendered in Ukrainian as „з метою....”

Besides, translators of official documents must pay special attention to translation of standard terms and terminological word combination in the texts.

Translation of official documents: Grammatical Aspects

The style of official documents is represented by the following substyles or variants:

• The language of business documents;

• The language of legal documents;

• The language of diplomacy;

• The language of military documents.

Like other styles of language, this style has a definite communicative aim and, accordingly, has its own system of interrelated language and stylistic means. The main aim of this type of communication is to state the conditions binding two parties in an undertaking and to reach agreement between two contracting parties.

Each of the subdivisions of this style has its own peculiar terms, phrases and expressions, which differ from the corresponding terms, phrases and expressions of other variants of this style.

The peculiar features common to all stylistical varieties of official documents are the following:

• The use of abbreviations, conventional symbols and contractions;

• The use of words in their logical dictionary meaning;

• Absence of emotiveness;

• Definite compositional patterns and design

It should be also mentioned that the syntactical pattern of this style is as important as the vocabulary.

Translation of legal, economic, diplomatic and official business papers requires not only sufficient knowledge of terms, phrases and expressions, but also depends on the clear comprehension of the structure of a sentence, some specific grammar and syntactical patterns, which are characteristics of the style.

Coming across an unknown term in the text a translator can consult a dictionary. Coming across such a phenomenon as the NOMINATIVE ABSOLUTE CONSTRUCTION, for instance, a translator can find it time-consuming to search for an equivalent conveying its meaning, unless he or she already knows the corresponding pattern.