Fuzziness In Legal Language And Its Translation

Fuzziness is an essential attribute of natural language. Fuzziness is sometimes also called vagueness .It is deeply recognized that fuzzy phenomena, fuzzy conceptions and fuzzy thinking are important for people to know the objective world and accordingly follow the trend of it. The recent decades have witnessed scholars'interest in fuzziness and increasing importance in the linguistic research field.Legal English refers to an English literary style that penetrates all the process of legislation, judicature and legal enforcement in common-law countries. As a kind of customary language it includes some words, phrases and mode of expression with its unique style. One of the most important characteristics of legal English is exact in its usage. But as a branch of language, legal English is inevitably fuzzy, vague words can be found everywhere in legal texts and judicial practice. Efforts have been made here to compromise the contradiction between vagueness and preciseness.In recent years, fuzzy legal language has been realized and discussed by many scholars both in china and abroad. To date, much progress has been achieved, which has provided precious material for the study of fuzziness. However, as a relatively new branch with the requirement of knowledge of both linguistics and law, there is still a very long way to go. Moreover, lots of people still consider fuzziness in law contra-scientific and they even suggest the removal of it. Concerning the current research situation, the author thinks: Fuzzy language objectively exists in legal language, and fuzzy legal language is a necessary and rational aid for preciseness of legal language. So author indicates the importance of translation of fuzzy legal language, and presents a set of principles and measures of translation of fuzzy legal language.The thesis is composed of five chapters: Chapter 1 gives a brief introduction of the thesis, including rationale and significance of the present study, questions to be investigated, and research methodology and data collection. Chapter 2 presents the origin and importance of fuzziness in language, a brief view of fuzzy legal language. Chapter 3 presents a brief introduction to legal translation, include: the features of legal language, the major difficulties of legal language translation and its general principles and the essentials of legal translation. Chapter 4 presents translation principles and strategies of fuzzy legal Language, Chapter 5 makes a conclusion, apart from this, the author makes an attempt to give some directions for further study, sincerely hoping that this thesis may arouse the interests of the readers and lay a foundation for further study.