Strategies For Translating Fuzzy Language In Non-literary Translation

Fuzziness is one of the major characteristics of language. In recent years, there are an increasing number of researches in the study of fuzziness, and many scholars are trying to solve the problems of fuzzy language. When the research of fuzzy language has become mature, modern research has turned the perspective to the question of fuzziness in translation. However, most researches of fuzzy language in translation are focused on literary translation, while non-literary translation, especially translation of literary criticism, has seldom been studied in detail.The Mission of Art, a book published in 2001 about artists’ vision and mission, was written by Grey, a famous American painter. The book is mainly related to the theories of literature and art, which belongs to the category of philosophy-social science of non-literary translation. The writer of this thesis has already finished the translation of Chapter 6(Art of Goodwill) and Chapter 7(Art as Spiritual Practice) before the writing of the paper. In this paper, the writer makes a case study on chapter 6 and chapter 7 in The Mission of Art under the guidance of former studies on fuzzy language, focusing on the specific problems that appear in the translation process.The great influence that fuzzy language has on translators mainly lies either in their understanding or their expression. Therefore, fuzziness in translation can be roughly classified into two categories: the fuzzy understanding of the original text and the fuzzy expression in the translated text. The writer argues that fuzzy understanding is mainly caused by different ways of thinking and different habits of language use, while fuzzy expression is mostly due to different extension of concepts and different syntactic structures.By illustrating the typical examples from lexical level, phrasal level and sentential level, the writer summarizes three specific strategies of Accuracy-Fuzziness, Fuzziness-Fuzziness and Fuzziness-Accuracy to analyze the fuzzy language in translation, which aims to deal with the concrete problems in non-literary translation, especially in the translation of texts of literary criticism. What’s more, with the background of globalization, non-literary translation is gradually increasing in quantity, and this study is also hoped to contribute to non-literary translation to some degree. Therefore, the study is expected to be of practical significance to improve the quality of non-literary translation.