Fuzziness In Legislative Language And Legal Translation

Since China entered into WTO and the progress of globalization, the connection between China and the other countries is getting closer. There is a trend that the contact among the countries in the politic, economic and cultural fields is becoming deeper and deeper. Under such circumstances, it is vital to perfect our laws and regulations in enlarging international communication. Thus, the exquisite translation of the domestic laws is of the most importance. And legal translation has drawn lots of attention from translators.Accuracy is the foremost feature of legal language. In legislative language, the legislators try their best to employ the most precise and clear expressions to indicate far-reaching and meaningful legal information. It seems that fuzzy expressions should never be found in legislative language. However, as a natural language and in a social life, fuzziness is an avoidable feature of legal language. Fuzziness does not weaken the accuracy and rigorousness of the law; instead, it is a supplement of the law and has its own distinct effect. The thesis discusses the reasons and necessity of fuzziness in legislative texts through the fuzzy set theory and makes a brief summary of the manifestation in the Criminal Law of the People's Republic of China. Based on equivalent and functional translation theories, the thesis puts forward some strategies to translate fuzzy expressions.The thesis is composed of five chapters.The first chapter gives a brief introduction to legal language and analyzes the lexical and syntactic features of legal language with the Criminal Law as a specific example.The second chapter introduces the fuzzy set theory to discuss fuzzy linguistics. It draws a conclusion that fuzziness is an inherent attribute of languages through the perspectives of semantics and pragmatics.The third chapter makes a further understanding of the features of legislative language, which can be treated as a supplementary part of chapter one. Then the author analyzes the reasons of fuzziness in legislative language and its manifestation in the Criminal Law and its necessity. Then in this chapter the author sums up the relationship between fuzziness and precision.In the fourth chapter the author focuses on the equivalent and functional translation theories. It is found that with regard to the translation of fuzzy expressions, the unity of the two theories could be a better way.The last chapter summarizes some translation strategies of fuzzy words with specific examples extracted from the Criminal Law.