Lexical Vagueness In The Chinese Legislative Language And Its Translation

Since the concept of “vagueness” was first proposed by L. Zadeh, an Americancybernetist, scholars and experts at home and abroad have proposed their views from manyperspectives, such as linguistics, translation, culture and law. The research that integrateslegal language and vague language is the most distinctive and has achieved remarkableresults. Therefore, vagueness in legislative language are not only the hot topic pursued bylawyers and law professors, but also the subject that receives close attention from scholarsof legal language and legal translation.Taking consideration of the importance of vagueness in legislative language and legaltranslation, this paper mainly focuses on the following aspects. Firstly, this paper gives anoverview to legislative language and its vague features, and then analyzes vaguenessexisting in legislative language, holding that the research is conducive to optimizing legallanguage, thus improving the communication effect of legislative language. Secondly, thispaper probes into the manifestations of lexical vagueness in the Chinese legislativelanguage, which are nominal vagueness, adjectival and adverbial vagueness, numeral andquantifier vagueness, pronominal and auxiliary vagueness, and prepositional vagueness.Also, this paper focuses on the reasons of lexical vagueness in the Chinese legislativelanguage, holding that the intrinsic features of legislative language, requirements oflegislative principles and the lawmakers’ restriction of cognition all contribute to lexicalvagueness in the Chinese legislative language. Finally, this paper summarizes four generaltranslation principles, which are principles of preciseness, formalness, consistency andconciseness, and then puts forward corresponding translation strategies for vagueexpressions in the Chinese legislative language, i.e. vagueness to vagueness, preciseness tovagueness and flexible translation strategies.This paper tries to study vagueness in the Chinese legislative language with anemphasis on the manifestations from the level of lexicon, analyzes the reasons that lead tolexical vagueness in the Chinese legislative language, and reaches the conclusion that theapplication of vague expressions will enhance the preciseness of legislative language.Based on the above analysis, the author puts forward the corresponding translationstrategies so as to make contribution to the research on legal language and legal translation.