A Corpus-based Study of the Chinese Translation for the Conditional Clause Patterns in International Legal Instruments

The Chinese translation for international legal instruments is an indispensable part in national political and economic fields. Apart from legal terminology, the syntactical features of international legal instruments also deserve study. They are easy to be seen in the use of some typical sentence patterns, such as long and complex sentence structures, passive voice and provisos or conditional clauses. Based on the parallel English-Chinese international conventions, this paper mainly evaluates the current Chinese translation and summarizes the use frequency and translation strategies for the conditional clause patterns. From the perspective of memetics, sentence patterns can be units of imitation, and the summary of and comments on them and their Chinese translation will promote the transmission across culture and help a legal translator improve his/her expertise, which will eventually be good for successful cooperation in international business.