Fuzzy Semantics And Fuzzy Equivalence In Translation Study

As an inherent characteristic of language, fuzziness refers to the indeterminacy involved in the analysis of linguistic unit. In particular, the fuzziness of meaning is identified when people are uncertain of the membership of some borderland cases for a semantic category. With this uncertainty, a semantic category fails to have its boundary clearly distinguished from another, and as a result, its meaning cannot be precisely defined. However, the other two characteristics, that is, determinacy and variability should not be ignored either. All the characteristics of fuzziness make the language more flexible and rich.The appearance of fuzziness in actual utterance is known as fuzzy language, which derives from three aspects. The most typical aspect is the employment of fuzzy words. In this paper, the author uses the theory of semantic field to make the analysis of fuzzy words. And, the abundance of linguistic hedges existing in the natural language also has the great influence on the meaning of expressions. The use of hedges gives the adjustment about the degree of fuzziness. Besides, the last kind of fuzziness can be brought by implicature, namely, even the precise utterances may carry fuzzy meanings.In communication fuzzy language is often used pragmatically to some extent and thus is unavoidably prevalent in daily life. Besides, the skillful use of it usually helps bring about special effects both aesthetically and pragmatically, which makes the study of fuzzy language become significant.In this paper the key part is involved in the disposal of the fuzzy language in the translation study. As an essential issue in translation, 'equivalence' has been a central topic in the field for a long time. With the further realization of translation, new concepts of equivalence spring up so much such as the concept of textual equivalence proposed by Catford; also there was another influential one made by Nida, that is, dynamic equivalence, etc. However, owing to the difference of culture and language system, all levels of equivalence e.g. textual, stylistic, etc in translating process is hardly to achieve. So under the inspiration of this point, the author exploringly proposed the concept of fuzzy equivalence, In order to make the fuzzy language attainable through fuzzy equivalence, appropriate translating strategies are discussed too in this paper.