Comparison of International Legal Text in Chinese and English under the Perspective of Functional Equivalence Theory--A Case Study of the Economic and Trade Agreement between China and United States

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-609-3_73How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Functional Equivalence; International Law; China-US Economic and Trade Agreement; Linguistic Comparison; Translation Strategies

Abstract

In recent years, international legal documents have attracted academic attention regarding bilingual equivalence. However, there have been no case studies on linguistic comparison between the Chinese and English versions of the China-US Economic and Trade Agreement. Based on the theory of functional equivalence, this paper compares the two versions from two dimensions: lexis and syntax. The study finds that at the lexical level, the document uses methods such as near equivalence of terms, equivalence of formal style, contextualized word selection, explanatory partial equivalence, and addition or omission of words to achieve semantic equivalence. At the syntactic level, it adopts methods such as nominalization, explicit reference, active-passive voice conversion, explicit logical relations, and adjustment of prepositional phrase positions. This study verifies that functional equivalence theory is applicable to international legal texts. This paper suggests that semantic and functional equivalence should be prioritized over formal equivalence in the translation of international legal texts.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Yihan Zhang
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/09/04
TI  - Comparison of International Legal Text in Chinese and English under the Perspective of Functional Equivalence Theory--A Case Study of the Economic and Trade Agreement between China and United States
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 3rd International Conference on Public Relations and Media Communication (PRMC 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 679
EP  - 685
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-609-3_73
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-609-3_73
ID  - Zhang2026
ER  -