A Corpus-based Descriptive Study On The Translation Of Hedges In International Maritime Conventions

The International Maritime Conventions, by setting the standardization and regulation of maritime activities, plays an important role to guarantee the security and equality of international trade and transportation. As a contracting state of all the most important International Maritime Conventions, the accurate translation of those International Maritime Conventions is of considerable significance to China to ensure the right of international trade concerned and to better implement those conventions.Hedging, as a linguistic phenomenon, is a raising subject in linguistic world. Fuzziness, being inherent feature in human language, has been recognized and discussed since long time as a heated field. Hedges play such an important role as an indispensable part of fuzziness, and it is intricate for the legal translators to master the strategies for accurate translation. The thesis aims to find out the rules and principles in the translation of hedges in International Maritime Conventions by applying both quantitative and qualitative methods.This study applies corpus-based methodology for the collection and classification of hedges for further analysis. A parallel corpus of International Maritime Convention was built on the basis of230,000words text with the help of the Trados program.10,401hedges in word form or phrase form are collected from the parallel corpus by the usage of AntConc concordance program. Under the guidance of the Newmark’s translation theory, the following conclusions are reached after the analysis:Firstly, the hedges are heavily used in International Maritime Conventions with10,401total hedges presenting in the word or phrase forms. And the four types of hedges under the pragmatic classification are not evenly distributed, with the plausibility shields most and the attribution shields least. Adaptors are also more that rounders. Besides, the word classes of each type are divergent to each other, the same is true for the translations of those hedges of different types.Secondly, the translation techniques are mainly six kinds under the guidance of Newmark’s translation theory, namely omission, amplification, voice transformation, change of word class, replacement, and context inference.Thirdly, the translation techniques for each type of hedges in International Maritime Conventions are divergent. For instance, for rounders, the hedges of range always go along with numbers, the translation technique is mainly replacement to keep the equivalent effect during the translation, but for plausibility shields, nearly all of the translation techniques are applied due to the divergent forms that the hedges appeares and the difference expressions.