A Study Of Hedges In Chinese Diplomatic Language And Their English Translations

Hedges have aroused the attention and interest from scholars at home and abroad. Hedges are an important member of fuzzy language. The study of hedges has been really hot during the past few decades, including hedges in literature works, films, diplomatic language and other fields. Although there have existed lots of studies of hedges in many fields, the researches of hedges in Chinese diplomatic language and their English translations from the perspective of “pragmatic equivalence” theory are relatively few, which are meaningful and need further research.The author collects the speeches of Chinese Premier in the press conference after the two sessions during five successive years from 2009 to 2013 and their English translations as the research materials. This paper conducts a comparative study of hedges in Chinese diplomatic language in the two sessions and their English translations. The research tries to find out how hedges are distributed in Chinese diplomatic language and their English translations respectively and what deviations exist in hedges in Chinese diplomatic language and their English translations in terms of “pragmatic equivalence” theory.Through the research in this paper, some findings have been summarized. First, both hedges in Chinese diplomatic language and those in the English translations of Chinese diplomatic language account for a relatively big part. The percentage of hedges in Chinese diplomatic language is 2.07% on average and the percentage of hedges in the English translations of Chinese diplomatic language is 2.64% on average. Second, approximators account for the most part in both hedges in Chinese diplomatic language and hedges in the English translations of Chinese diplomatic language, while shields account for a relatively small part in both hedges in Chinese diplomatic language and hedges in the English translations of Chinese diplomatic language. Third, the percentage of hedges in the English translations of Chinese diplomatic language is bigger than the percentage of hedges in Chinese diplomatic language, with the former being 2.64%on average and the latter being 2.07%on average. Fourth, it is found that in most cases, pragmatic equivalence is observed and is generally achieved during the process of translating hedges in Chinese diplomatic language into their English counterparts. However, there do exist some deviations between the hedges in Chinese diplomatic language and their English translations in terms of “pragmatic equivalence” theory. The deviations are addition of pragmatic meaning, omission of pragmatic meaning, and distortion of pragmatic meaning.