This paper focuses on vague language in E-C translation and it is pided into the following five parts。 Chapter One is an introduction, which presents a whole background of this research and the research significance。 Chapter Two introduces the definition and classifications of vague language。 Chapter Three illustrates some characteristics of vague language。 Chapter Four illustrates different translation strategies of vague language in E-C translation。 The last part summaries the research value of this paper。
II。 An Overview of Vague Language
It is known that vague language is an inevitable and universal phenomenon in different language which has been researched by many scholars。 L。 A。 Zadeh developed the famous Vague-Set Theory。 His Vague Sets published in Information and Control in 1965 and initiated the birth of the vague-Set theory。 G。 Lakoff, Zadeh’s follower, has applied “Fuzzy-Set Theory” to natural language data。 In the past few decades, because of those scholars’ endeavor, great success has been achieved about the study of vague language。 Nowadays, vagueness has been researched from different perspectives, such as semantic vagueness, pragmatic vagueness and syntactic vagueness and so on。 Vague language becomes more and more important in human life。 However, there are two problems of vague language that remain to be solved, that is, the definition and the classifications of vague language。
2。1 The Definition of Vague Language
Before analyzing the definition of vague language, it is important to make clear the difference between vagueness and fuzziness。 Some scholars think that vagueness is different from fuzziness while others think fuzziness in language belong to the field of the study of vagueness。 Professor He Ziran think that vagueness can embrace the fuzziness。 (24) But other linguists think the two words refer to the same meaning。 Although there are many different views, in this paper, the author regards both of them as the same meaning; they refer to the referential indefiniteness in natural language。 However, the author prefers to use vagueness in the paper。
What is vague language? It is a basic question that all scholars and linguists who study vague language must answer。 In this paper, before studying the classifications of vague language in E-C Translation, the author should make clear the basic question。 In the past few decades, this question has been researched from many different perspectives by many famous scholars。 However, no one can find one definition that can satisfy all the scholars and linguists。 There are some different definitions from different linguists as follows;
In David Crystal’s opinion, vagueness is a term derived from mathematics and used by some linguists to refer to the indeterminacy involved in a linguistic unit or pattern。 (37)
Shi Anshi points out that there is no clear boundary about vague language。论文网
Crystal and Day called vagueness as imprecision。
Ullmann, a famous scholar, attributes vagueness to four factors, that is, generic character of words; meaning is never homogeneous, lack of clear-cut boundaries in the non-linguistic world and lack of familiarity with what the words stand for。 (118)
Famous linguist Joana Channel writes a more convincing definition of vague language in her book, vague language。 She exposits it as follows;
a。 It can be compared with other words or expressions which appear to render the same proposition;
b。 It is purposely and unabashedly vague;
c。 Its meaning arises from the intrinsic uncertainty referred to by pierce。 (20)
Of course, other scholars and linguists also have convincing definitions。 In this paper, the author just lists five relatively convincing definitions。 No matter how persified the definitions are, it can be concluded simply, that means, indefiniteness and uncertainty of the borderline of word’s meaning。 According to the simply conclusion, the author finds there are numerous vague languages in English。 For example, when two persons are talking: 英汉翻译中的模糊语现象浅析(2):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_98703.html