A Pragmatic Approach To The Translating Of Vague Language In Legal Texts

The nature of legal language is accuracy and precision in that legal drafters,more often than not,make tremendous efforts to convey the maximum amount of information with the minimum amount of language.It seems that there is no room for vague language in legal texts,but considerable previous studies show that vague language is of great importance and constitutes an indispensable part of the legal language.However,these studies on vague language are mainly carried out from the semantic prospect,failing to provide either an adequate explanation or a feasible guidance with regard to the interpretation and translation of the vague language used in the legal settings.Based on Relevance Theory(Sperber & Wilson,1986/1995)and the dual manifestation and inference model,the present thesis aims to study VL and its translation from the pragmatic prospective.Different from the traditional encoding and decoding model for translation,the dual manifestation and inference model provides a sharp tool and theoretical basis for the translator to better understand and translate vague language,as it divides the whole translation process into two independent and interactive processes.In the first process,the translator makes inference of the implied meaning of the vague language and the legal intent of the law maker by activating all the factors he can resort to;in the second process,he manifests all the information to the target readership in consideration of such factors as the expectations and cognitive environment of the reader and the legal professional culture.In both processes,the translator's inferential and translation activities are carried out strictly under the principle of optimal relevance.He should try his best to render an ideal translation which can achieve the maximal contextual effect and require least inferential effort of the reader.Through the analysis of different types of vague language collected from the laws and regulations promulgated in the past two or three years and a case study of two English versions of the Criminal Law of the People's Republic of China,it is well confirmed that it is feasible to apply the Principle of Relevance and dual manifestation and inference model into the study of vague language and its translation. Though the present study only covers the vague language used in the legislative texts, it may,optimistically,shed some new light on the study of vague language in other text types.