On Translating Ancient Chinese Prose Into English-A Linguistic Fuzziness Perspective

Fuzziness is an important constituent that makes natural languages so expressive and diverse, and it is one of the intrinsic features of natural languages. Linguistic fuzziness theory, with the fuzziness of natural languages as its object of study, has been applied in the theory and practice of translation studies. In literary works, fuzzy languages are even more widely used, in order to express the writers'feelings and emotions, and to achieve a kind of artistic conception. Therefore, the translation of literary works should attach importance to the rendering of fuzzy language.As a kind of literary work, the most notable feature of ancient Chinese prose should be its sense of brevity and beauty, which is largely achieved by using very vivid and concise language. These languages used are often fuzzy and contain very rich meanings. As a matter of fact, linguistic fuzziness is so widely existed that it is also the most prominent linguistic feature of ancient Chinese prose. Therefore, the study of fuzzy language is of great significance in the translation of ancient Chinese prose.This thesis is composed of several parts. The first part is a literature review, which summarizes the current studies of linguistic fuzziness and the translation of fuzzy languages. The second part is a discussion of the translation criteria of fuzzy languages in literary works by introducing the reception aesthetics theory. In the third part, which is divided into three main sections, the present author gives a detailed analysis of the translation of ancient Chinese prose. In the first section, by making a comparison of the frequency of appearance of fuzzy language in several types of essays, the present author proposes that linguistic fuzziness is most frequently adopted in lyrical and descriptive essays. The second section is an in-depth analysis of three different versions of translation of The Yueyang Tower, which reveals the important role of the translation of fuzzy languages in ancient Chinese prose. The third section is a discussion about several strategies of the translation of fuzzy languages in ancient Chinese prose. Finally, the present author draws the conclusion that it is of significance to study the ancient Chinese prose translation from a linguistic fuzziness perspective.The significance of this thesis lies in this: Although ancient Chinese prose has long been translated into English by many famous translators, the number of researches done on the translation of ancient Chinese prose is relatively small. The present thesis discussed the translation of ancient Chinese prose from a linguistic fuzziness perspective, in the hope that it may shed some light on the study and practice of ancient Chinese prose translation.