Semantic Fuzziness And Its Translation Strategies

In 1975, Zadeh, an American scientist, first put forward the concept of fuzziness, and thus signified a revolutionary change in our thinking. Since then, fuzziness has aroused heated debate in the academic circle. And as time goes on, fuzziness has developed into a subject relating to mathematics, logics, psychology and linguistics. And with a bright future, fuzzy linguistics, which began to develop in the 1970s, is a new science concerned fuzzy language, especially from the prospective of pragmatics, which is concerning about the language use and interpreting. And in this thesis, the author wants to discuss the forms of fuzzy language, the functions of fuzzy language and some relevant translation strategies for fuzzy language.The thesis also analyzes the differences among vagueness, fuzziness, generality and ambiguity by presenting their definitions and examples. Then the thesis mainly discusses fuzziness in three aspects ~ phonological fuzziness, semantic fuzziness and rhetorical fuzziness. Based on what-has been discussed above, the thesis analyzes semantic fuzziness on words level, especially in English. And after that, some other forms of fuzziness are examined too. After a brief introduction of fuzziness, its functions and translation strategies are the main points of this thesis. The functions of fuzzy language in the respect of pragmatics and stylistics will be discussed. And some related translation strategies will be discussed, combined with Newmark's translation methods.Each language is an independent entity. That is to say, from the perspective of pronunciation, grammar or something similar, languages are independent to each other. But from the perspective of cross-cultural communication, language is interconnected. That is to say, languages are translatable between each other. And a translator plays the role of bringing different languages together. So the translator should make his or her own measure to have the effect of the translation -- in Newmark's opinion — to fulfill the two main aims of translation: accuracy and economy by usingsemantic translation, communicative translation or mixing them together.And the translation strategies for fuzzy language will be classified into three types in this thesis. The first is that fuzzy language in the original language will be rendered fuzzy in the target one. The second is by using addition, ellipsis and some other changes where necessary. And the third one is using precise concepts to replace fuzzy ones or vice versa.As far as the translation strategies are concerned, the first translation strategies can be viewed as a semantic translation, the second, a communicative translation and the third, an effective way to combine the semantic translation and the communicative translation together, and thus realizing the effect of translation — equivalence, which is also a fuzzy concept.