A Comparative Study On The Fuzziness Of Vanity Fair And Its Two Chinese Versions Under The Law Of Fuzziness

Fuzzy language in literary works characterizes the objects with indefinite boundary, which isthe cause of free imagination and various understandings for the readers. In the process oftranslating, translators shall not only be faithful to the source language (SL), conveying theliteral information in the source text as accurately as possible, but also responsible for thesame or similar aesthetic imagination of the target-text readers as their source-textcounterparts. Therefore, it is significant to translate fuzzy language properly. According to thelaw of fuzziness, the fuzziness of SL and TL is different in degree. When the TL is close tothe SL in terms of the degree of fuzziness, their reader’s imagination and understandings willbe correspondingly approaching. Vanity Fair is W.M.Thackeray’s classic work. It is full offuzzy language, and its several Chinese versions are widely read. After a thorough read andcomparison of Vanity Fair and its translated versions, fuzzy language in the work is classifiedas three types: fuzziness at linguistic level, fuzziness at cultural level and fuzziness atrhetorical level. Then in this paper, the degree of fuzziness of Vanity Fair and its two Chineseversions is compared and analyzed completely and comprehensively, in which process, boththe quantitative method and qualitative method are adopted. Since information entropy isintroduced to measure the degree of fuzziness in terms of quantitative analysis, a versionmuch closer to the source text in terms of fuzziness is intended to be worked out on arelatively objective basis. At last, some inspirations about the law of fuzziness and fuzzylanguage translation are gained in this study.