of insurance is to obtain indemnity in case of damage or loss.
Insurance is against risk. While goods are in a warehouse, the
insurance covers the risk of fire, burglary, etc. as soon as the goods
are in transit they are insured against pilferage, damage by water,
breakage or leakage. The insured is better protected if his goods are
insured against all risks. The goods may be also covered against
general and particular loss or damage.
Force majeure is a force against which you cannot act or fight.
Every contract has a force majeure clause. It usually includes natural
disasters such as an earthquake, flood, fire, etc. It can also include
such contingencies as war, embargo, sanctions. Along with this there
are some other circumstances beyond the Sellers’ control. The Seller
may find himself in a situation when he can’t fulfil his obligation
under the contract. When negotiating a contract a list of
contingencies must be agreed on and put into the contract.
When a manager makes up a contract he must not think only of his
one-side interest. He must think in terms of common interest with his
counterpart. Only then will he prove loyal to his partner. In case of
a contingency the Seller must notify the Buyers of a force majeure
right away. If it is done in due time the Buyer may take immediate
action to protect his interest.
A force majeure must be a proven fact. The Seller is to submit to
the Buyer a written confirmation issued by the Chamber of Commerce to
this effect. The duration of a force majeure is, as a rule, 4 or 6
months. After that the Buyer has a right to cancel the contract. The
Seller in this case has no right to claim any compensation for his
losses.
Claims and sanctions. A contract defines rights and obligations of
the parties involved. Most often the Buyer makes quality and quantity
claims on the Seller. The cause for complaint may be poor quality,
breakage, damage, short weight, leakage, etc. The Buyer must write a
statement of claim and mail it to the Seller together with the
supporting documents: Bill of Lading, Airway and Railway Bill, Survey
Report, Quality Certificate are documentary evidence. Drawings,
photos, samples are enclosed as proofs of claims. The date of a
complaint is the date on which it is mailed.
Claims can be lodged during a certain period of time, which is
usually fixed in a contract. During the claim period the Seller is to
enquire into the case and communicate his reply. He either meets the
claim or declines it. If a claim has a legitimate ground behind it the
parties try to settle it amicably. The Seller in turn is entitled to
make a claim on his counterpart if the Buyer fails to meet his
contractual obligations. The Seller may inflict penalties on the Buyer
if there is a default in payment. Financially, legitimate claims are
in large part settled by debit or credit notes [10, P. 12 – 28].
4. Types of contracts. Abbreviations
In order to speed up the preparation of contract documents and to
minimise possibility of errors in them, a unified standardised form of
contract documents, the Master Pattern for Contract Documents, has
been developed. It establishes principles and regulations for the
construction of standardised forms of documents used in foreign trade,
like Supplement to contract, Order and Order confirmation.
Supplement to contract is a business document which is an integral
part of the contract, containing amendments or additions to the
previously agreed contract conditions. The supplement should also be
agreed on and signed by both the exporter and the importer.
Order is a business document presenting the importer’s offer for
dealing which contains specific conditions of a future transaction.
Order Confirmation is a business document presenting the exporter’s
message containing unclaused acceptance of the order conditions. The
Master pattern has also been accepted as a basis for standardised
forms of enquiries and offers, used at pre-contract stages of dealing
[5, P.131 – 132].
Different firms and organisations trading regularly, work out
standardised forms of contracts for typical deals. Such standardised
contracts are printed and include typical rights and duties of the
contracting sides in selling and buying some goods and services. There
are special columns for the names of the Buyer and Seller, names of
goods, their quantity, prices and delivery terms. In case of declining
or adding some terms, people use supplementary columns in a contract
form.
Standardised forms of export and import deals differ greatly and it
makes them two general types of contracts [13, P.146]. Thus, there are
export and import contracts. They reflect different positions of
buyers and sellers in trading. Contracts in import trade are called
orders, and their submission warrancy, and delivery terms, as well as
sanctions are much harder towards the sellers than those ones in
export trade. Standardised forms of import contracts are sent to
potential buyers before getting commercial proposals and, actually,
before striking a deal. The languages of contracts are agreed upon on
the both sides. It goes without saying that information and style are
kept the same not depending on the language of contract.
As textual varieties, contracts are divided into administrative-
managerial, financial-economical, advertising, scientific-technical,
and artistic-publicational contracts(. Functional spheres of their
circulation can be easily guessed from names of contract types in this
classification, and are the subject of economic, rather than
linguistic, study.
Contracts may be differentiated by the subject of a deal. There are
export contracts for the sale of oil products, machinery tools, grain,
timber, the supply of goods, etc. Orders in import trade deal with
ordering and purchasing goods. They are often supported with requests,
remindings, verifications of different terms, guarantee and waving
inspection letters, and many others.
Goods in international trade are transported with the help of
multimodal (door-to-door) shipment. In contracts delivery and
acceptance terms are marked with the International Commercial Terms
(Incoterms) [10, P.16]. So, contracts can be classified in accordance
with the way of delivery. Most of Incoterms are represented as
abbreviations.
The usage of abbreviations, conventional symbols and contractions
is typical of all kinds of documents. Abbreviations are abundant, and
there are special dictionaries to decode them. They serve as signs of
the code supposed to be known only to the “initiated” [3, P.316].
On the whole, there are 14 official Incoterms of deliverance. They
denote:
1. The point of deliverance. EX Works means that the seller’s only
responsibility is to make the goods available at his premises.
EX Ship means that the seller shall make the goods available to
the buyer on board the ship at the destination named in the
sales contract. EX Quay means that the seller makes the goods
available to the buyer on the quay at the destination named in
the sales contract.
2. The way of deliverance. FOB means Free on Board. The goods are
placed on board a ship by the seller at a port of shipment named
in the sales contract. FAS means Free Alongside Ship. That means
that goods should be placed alongside the ship to fulfil the
seller’s obligations. FOR / FOT mean Free on Rail / Free on
Truck. Truck here relates to the railway wagons, and that makes
these abbreviations synonymous. FOB Airport is based on the same
main principle as the ordinary FOB term. The seller fulfils his
obligations by delivering the goods to the air carrier at the
airport of departure.
3. Payment terms. C & F means Cost and Fright. The seller must pay
the costs and fright necessary to bring the goods to the named
destination, but the risk of loss or damage to the goods is
transferred from the seller to the buyer when the goods pass the
ship’s rail in the port of shipment. CIF means Cost, Insurance
and Fright. This term is basically the same as C & F but with
the addition that the seller has to procure marine insurance
against the risk of loss or damage to the goods during the
carriage.
Thus, in Chapter 1 we have made an attempt to clarify some items of
the topic. They are the following:
The nature of the English of documents writing is determined by its
stylistic realisation in written English. The style of official
documents possesses its own features which are reflected in
standardised forms of different documents. They are peculiarities of
the vocabulary, grammar and syntactic constructions, which are the
subject of consideration in the practical part of this paper.
The main problem of writing contracts is embodied in the notion of
stylistic use. Formal style of business English is rather hard to
obtain and to follow. It remains mostly in written form, and its
peculiarities should be strictly observed. Some theoretical problems
of its functioning have already been considered. Nevertheless,
informal English influences it greatly, and even in routine papers we
may find deviations from the accepted form.
It can be explained by the fact that business is made by people,
and not robots. A person’s individuality, as well as emotions and
feelings, more and more often peer into a cool and logical world of
Страницы: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
