A Study Of Fuzzy Language In Legal Texts And Its Translation

In 1965, the birth of L. A. Zadeh's fuzzy set theory has brought innovations to the academic circles. It has especially provided a theoretical basis to explain language fuzziness, which exists in all aspects of natural language and speech:phonology, semantics, lexicology and grammar. And it has already exerted profound influence on many academic spheres:foreign language teaching, linguistics, translation studies etc.Channell (1994:200) once stated in his famous works Vague Language:"In some people's eyes, language should be clear and precise, but the reality is language, just like many other objects in the world, never can be completely precise; On the contrary, it may be vague, general, fuzzy and so on." In his creative paper "Vagueness", Russel (1923:84) also suggested that "Vagueness and precision alike are characteristics which only belong to a representation, of which language is an example." Furthermore, he argued that all languages are vague because vagueness infects all words.The application of fuzzy linguistics in research of legal works has been greatly developed these years. As we all know, one of the most important characteristics of legal language is precision in its expression. However, as one of the natural languages which are intrinsically fuzzy, legal language is inevitably fuzzy to some extent. And nowadays, the study of legal language has been a bit too much focused on its precise and rigorous aspects while the fuzziness of legal language is somewhat overlooked. It is precisely this character that makes the law as accommodating and general as possible. In this thesis, the author analyzes the stylistic features of legal text; reviews the fuzzy set theory and fuzzy linguistics comprehensively; focuses on fuzziness, a characteristic opposite but not in conflict with accuracy of legal language and distinguishes three terms "vagueness", "fuzziness" and "ambiguity". Though demonstration researches in chapter four, the author emphasizes the fairness and righteousness of laws, thus legal language has to be inclusive and general so that it could cover as many cases as possible. In addition, inclusiveness of legal texts has much to do with the generality, fuzziness and indeterminacy in legal expression in that the former one results deeply from the latter ones. By virtue of the summary and induction of the above conceptions, the author further illustrates that fuzziness is an intrinsic feature of legal language.With in-depth researches on language fuzziness, people have got more comprehensive understanding on fuzziness itself and fuzzy language. From the perspective of social background, the changeability and unpredictability of the world contribute to the fuzzy nature of natural language. Different cultures may also contribute to the situation. At the same time, mankind's limited perception and cognition of the world constitute the subjective basis from which fuzzy language develops and derives.Translation involves reproducing the same ideas in another language. In legal translation practice, legal translators have to be equipped with usual translation techniques, more importantly, an integrated legal knowledge in both English and Chinese, e.g. legal history at home and abroad,history of legal ideology, comparative law methods etc. Only on the basis of an overall understanding of the differences and similarities between the western and oriental legal system can legal translators accurately convey the legal sense and truly follow the criteria of legal translation. Legal translation is an integral part of legal language system, and the language style of the parallel text should be in accordance with the source text as much as possible, especially when the translation of fuzziness in the legal texts is concerned. After having been studying a variety of works and papers on the legal language fuzziness and its translation, the author employs demonstration methods as research approach and conducts a relatively systematic research, based on which a brief summary and induction has been made in this thesis.