A Study Of Hedges In Est Documentations From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

As a special element of fuzzy language, the notion of hedge has aroused greatinterest. Hedges are communicative means of presenting a proposition as an opinionrather than a fact, often in terms of possibility and uncertainty. It can be used tomodify a predicate or nominal phrase’s membership or to modify the speaker’scommitment to the truth value of the utterance. Both foreign and Chinese scholarshave conducted a lot of researches on hedges in EST discourse, including thedefinition, classification, functions, and translation strategies. In order to apply propertranslation strategies on hedges in EST discourse, the primary work is to study the useof hedges in EST. However, few studies have been done on the phenomena andreasons of using hedges in practical technical documentations.Based on the previous studies, the author has established two corpora oftechnical English documents translated by Chinese technical translators and written bynative English speakers respectively. This study performs a quantitative andqualitative analysis on the application, realization, and distribution of hedges in bothChinese translation and native English technical documentation using Hyland’staxonomy model of hedges. Results reveal that there are a great number of hedgesused in both corpora，which can be classified into accuracy-oriented, writer-oriented,and reader-oriented hedges. According to Verschueren’s linguistic adaptation theory,hedges are actually a product of authors’ linguistic choice stemming from the dynamicinter-adaptation between the linguistic forms and their contextual correlates. Hedgesare adopted as a strategy in technical writing to adapt to the author and reader’s socialworld, mental world, as well as the physical world. Finally, translation strategies areproposed by considering the specific functions of different hedges, which includefinding equivalent words in target texts and addition.