A Corpus-based Study On The Translation Of Hedges In Business English Letters

The language in business letters is generally required to be concrete and clear inorder to avoid unnecessary dispute. However, it is also a common writing strategy touse hedges on many occasions with the purpose of achieving some particularpragmatic effects. The business letters will appear more polite and more persuasiveby the right choice of hedges. Therefore, it is essential for international businesspeople to translate hedges in business letters appropriately so as to reach a successfulcommunication.The present study aims to pragmatically analyze hedges in business letters, andlay special stress on explaining hedge translations. To achieve these objectives, thefollowing questions are mainly discussed:(1) What are the distributions of hedges insix different types of business letters?(2) What are the pragmatic functions ofhedges in business letters?(3) Are there any fixed patterns or regularities in theChinese translations of hedges in business English letters?(4) What are thefrequency differences of hedges between business English letters and the Chinesetranslation versions?(5) What are the implications of relevance theory for hedgetranslation in business English letters?This thesis applies the methodology of corpus-based study. A parallel corpusBLPC (Business Letters Parallel Corpus) was built based on120business Englishletters and120corresponding Chinese versions with the help of Trados. Total198sentences containing hedges were retrieved from BLPC by using Para Conc.Through qualitative and quantitative researches on the corpora, the conclusions arepresented as follows:(1) It is very common and necessary to use hedges in businessletters, and the sentences containing hedges account for about27.01%in BLPC.(2)Hedges can help to achieve the following pragmatic effects: improving expressiveefficiency, enhancing expressive flexibility, making letters more polite and morepersuasive.(3) The frequency of hedges in different types of business letters isdifferent because of various functions of business letters: Letters of establishingbusines relations> Letters of enquiry, offer and counter-offer> Claim letters> Shipment letters> Order letters> Payment letters.(4) Among the hedges,"will"ranks the most frequently-used hedges, then "would" and "consider". Besides,epistemic modal auxiliaries are used more frequently that other kinds of hedges,while epistemic nouns are the ones with the least frequent usage.(5) Most hedges inbusiness letters are translated into equivalent Chinese hedges, especially for theepistemic verbs.(6) Some sentence patterns containing hedges have relatively fixedChinese translations.(7) The usage of hedges in business English letters tend to bemore frequent than that in Chinese translation versions.(8) Relevance theory canhelp understand hedges, explain the hedge translations in business letters, and guidethe translators to find an appropriate translation strategy so as to achieve thedesirable communicative effects.