Analysis Of Hedges In The Chinese Version Of The Criminal Law Of The People's Republic Of China And Corresponding Translation Strategies

Legislative language aims to express accuracy and precision, which does not mean that there is no room for the hedges in legal texts. This research is concerned with the hedges in the Criminal Law text of the People's Republic of China and it will focus on two aspects. On one hand, hedges will be analyzed in the Criminal Law text of the People's Republic of China, in this process, the distribution, frequency and functions of hedges in the Criminal Law text will be demonstrated. On the other hand, corresponding translation strategies will be expounded. According to relevance theory applied in translation, the translation's major task is to infer the legislators'intent and legal effect of the proposition based on background knowledge, legal cognition and most importantly the context. In this process, three major translation strategies have been put forward: literal translation, pragmatic enrichment and contextual inference. Both descriptive and quantitative methods are adopted.This research is supposed to arrive at the following conclusions: firstly, hedges exist in the Criminal Law text of the People Republic of China. According to Prince's classification of hedges accepted in this thesis as the criterion, hedges can be categorized into four subtypes, which are adaptor, rounder, plausibility shield and attribution shield. Through data collection and analysis, it's found that three subtypes exist in the Criminal Law text of the People's Republic of China and have a high frequency. Secondly, the author finds out hedges in legal language is not only unavoidable but have certain legal sense if used appropriately. Thirdly, based on the Relevance Theory, in the process of translating hedges, different influencing factors have to be taken into account to achieve the optimal relevance between the legislators, translators and accepters.