A Study On Chinese Translation Of Fuzzy Words In English Prescriptive Legal Texts

Fuzziness is an intrinsic attribute of legal texts. Although precision is always a principle in legal writing and legal translation, accurate translation of legal texts is never easy because of the existence of fuzzy words. Therefore, the current study of Chinese translation of fuzzy words in English prescriptive legal texts aims to explore a translation strategy, which will be generally applicable to the translation of fuzzy words in English legal texts.This thesis first manifests two kinds of fuzziness in legal texts according to the definitions of fuzziness made by previous researchers: one is fuzzy boundary of a word's conceptual meaning and the other is the fuzzy core of the conceptual meaning itself. Then the current study, by conducting comparative analysis on two different Chinese versions of the same English prescriptive legal text, demonstrates two strategies for translating English legal texts with two kinds of fuzziness: fuzziness vs. fuzziness and precision vs. fuzziness. The former refers to using the equally fuzzy terms in the target text to replace the fuzzy words in the source text, and the latter indicates the utilizing of the relatively precise terms to render the fuzzy expressions in the original text into the target language to achieve the equivalent functional effect of the prescriptive legal text between the two languages.Through the comparison of the translation strategies employed by two different translators in rendering the same fuzzy words in the same context, the study mainly concludes: The translation strategy of fuzziness vs. fuzziness is usually used in translating the words with fuzzy boundary of conceptual meaning, while the strategy of precision vs. fuzziness is often employed to render words with fuzzy core, i.e. polysemous words, and the polysemous words in prescriptive legal texts can be categorized into two types from the view of translation strategy employed, and each of them employs a different translation strategy. Apart from that, this thesis also arrives at the view that there exists space for legal translators to manipulate their subjectivity and exert their creativity from the perspective of the translation strategy employed in translating polysemous words.