Translation Strategies Of Pragmatic Vagueness In Diplomatic Language From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

Vagueness in language widely exists in all human languages. To a certain extent, the use of the vague language can achieve better communication effect than that of precise language. The value of vague language should be embodied more in its pragmatic function. How to apply pragmatic vagueness to different languages has become the major concern for scholars at home and abroad in recent years. A case in point is that some scholars begin to combine pragmatic vagueness with diplomatic language so as to analyze their functions and applications. As one of the political languages, diplomatic language is widely used in various diplomatic circumstances among nations. As one of the major carriers in diplomatic activities, diplomatic language can surely have great impact on them. It is of great importance to adopt pragmatic vagueness to maintain a good and cooperative relation with other nations and to avoid arousing hostility to each other. As a matter of fact, the significance of pragmatic vagueness in diplomatic language lies in declaring one’s position, expressing politeness, protecting oneself, withholding information as well as breaking the deadlock, so as to achieve the result of win-win or all-win situation. With the increasingly more important role diplomatic language plays on the international stage, the study on translation strategies of pragmatic vagueness in diplomatic language has become a newly-emerged research concern.Diplomacy is a kind of communicative action with special purposes, the communicative purpose of which determines its contents and forms of communication. Based on Skopos Theory, this paper applies the three rules of Skopos Theory to explain and analyze the three kinds of translation strategies of pragmatic vagueness in the diplomatic language. The strategies are:from vagueness to accuracy, from accuracy to vagueness and from vagueness to vagueness. This analysis gives an insight into the fact that translators are expected to choose relevant rules and translation strategies to deal with pragmatic vagueness according to the specific communicative purpose in the diplomatic activities, so as to achieve the anticipated results.In this paper, the author collected15bilingual meeting minutes of Chinese Foreign Ministry regular press conferences from2009to2012, and elaborately selected29paragraphs as the examples to support the view of this paper. The translation strategies of pragmatic vagueness in diplomatic language are described and analyzed under the guidance of Skopos Theory, and the effectiveness that Skopos Theory has on the translation strategies of pragmatic vagueness in diplomatic language is revealed. Relevant studies in the past mainly focused on the application of Skopos Theory to translation of trade mark or translation of vague expression under the guidance of Adaptation Theory or Relevance Theory. Studies on translation strategies of pragmatic vagueness in diplomatic language are relatively inadequate in the existing literature. Thus, the author hopes that this paper can provide certain reference to some extent for the study and practice in this field.