A Preliminary Study On The Fuzzy Approach In E-C Translation

Fuzziness is one of the inherent features of all natural languages. However, due to the differences between cultures and thinking patterns, each language has a distinctive form of fuzziness. Therefore, as an interlingual activity, how to handle and transfer various kinds of fuzziness into another language has become a key issue of translation, especially of literary translation.After an overall review of the studies on fuzzy language both home and abroad, the author finds that Chinese scholars paid much more attentions to the relationship between language fuzziness and translation than the foreign ones owing to the peculiar emphasis on fuzzy beauty of Chinese. Nevertheless, most of these researches concentrated on the untranslatability of fuzziness or how to deal with the fuzzy expressions in C-E translation; while the fuzzy strategies adopted in E-C translation were rarely touched by scholars due to the neglect of the fuzziness of English. Therefore, the author, after a serious research, puts forward here a new translation approach especially designed for E-C translation of fuzzy expressions in English.The author starts her research with a comparative analysis of the different forms of fuzziness in English and Chinese, and this analysis leads to the necessity of proposing this new translation approach. As achieving equivalence is the final goal of translation, based on Nida's theory of formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence, this approach divides the translation of fuzzy language into two categories, namely the translation to achieve formal equivalence, and the translation to achieve dynamic equivalence.Then, the author makes a tentative analysis of Zhu Shenghao's translation of Romeo and Juliet, of which both the ST and TT are widely recognized. In this attempt, the author first sorts out almost all the translations involved in fuzziness in the TT, and studies the strategies employed by the translator. After this, the author summarizes and classifies them into mainly four categories, including the literal translation, restitution, cultural substitution and amplification. Among these four strategies, literal translation is usually employed to achieve formal equivalence, while the rest of them are often used for achieving dynamic equivalence. Therefore, this fuzzy translation approach is a balance of D-E and D-E.As a systematic translation approach, the fuzzy translation approach could provide guidance for translators to deal with the fuzzy phenomena in E-C translation by helping them to aware of the difference of fuzziness between English and Chinese, as well as offering a wide scope of helpful strategies to handle more effectively the fuzzy expressions in E-C translation. Meanwhile, by applying this approach, the aesthetic effect of the ST could be transferred successfully and the readability of the TT could be enhanced greatly. In addition, the fuzzy translation approach could evade the conflicts between literal and liberal translation.However, as a newly proposed approach, it still needs to be testified and improved, and by this research, the author hopes that the study on fuzzy language translation could draw the attentions of more researchers.