On The C-E Translation Limits Of Semantic Fuzzy Numerals

In recent 20 years, the research on language fuzziness has been developing rapidly in China. Even China's research plays a leading role in the international academic community. Under this circumstance, the research on fuzzy numerals has drawn more and more researchers'attention, since it is the common linguistic phenomenon in natural language and literature works. And the hot topics of this research have attained the tendency of multi-orientation. The research on semantic fuzziness of numerals, pragmatic fuzziness of numerals, fuzzy numeral translation and the boundary of fuzzy numerals becomes new emerging academic study shinning point. However, many previous studies turn out to be somehow disorder and messy on the categories of fuzzy numerals. This situation calls for a systematic and authoritative definition of fuzzy numerals so as to provide an acceptable basis to the fuzzy numeral research, fuzzy numeral translation research and other related research.Upon the consultation of previous studies, this thesis brings in a comparatively new and clear defining way of fuzzy numerals, which is put forward by Joanna Channell. And the following analysis on the functions of fuzzy numerals, the translation limits, the causes for the limits and the adjustment of the limits all base on this definition. Moreover, all of the following discussions are guided by the principle of functional equivalence translation theory and language, culture & translation theory.It is discussed that in fuzzy numeral translation, the limits on different levels of culture, image, sound and form arise when the full functional equivalence cannot be achieved. Furthermore, this paper finds that the differences in culture and formal structure as well as the semantic fuzziness are three major reasons for the presence of limits in fuzzy numeral translation. In order to discover the adjustment of translation limits, this paper sets up a corpus with 96 chapters of A Dream of Red Mansions translated by Yang Xianyi & Gladys Yang. The English concordance software Wordsmith software and the Chinese concordance software are employed to do the word frequency statistics. And at first, this paper makes quantitative study upon the corpus. Then the high frequent numerals, concluded in the quantitative study, become the main sample in the following qualitative study.By concordance, the highest frequency cardinal numeral is"one", and the highest frequency ordinal numeral is"first"; the second highest frequency numeral is"two/second". This paper means to analyse fuzzy numeral translation methodology based on the qualitative studies of these two high frequent numerals—"one/first"and"two/second". However, through the tagging procedure of corpus study, this paper finds that the translation approaches for"one"and"two"are not quite typical and comprehensive. Therefore, the analysis on the adjustment of translation limits has been illustrated with randomly selected but typical fuzzy numerals from 96 chapters of A Dream of Red Mansions. For this part, this study indicates that these limits in fuzzy numeral translation can be adjusted with the further development of research on translation methodology and the deep infiltration of different cultures.