Chinese-English Interpreting Of Diplomatic Fuzziness From The Perspective Of Semantic And Communicative Translation

With the improvement of China’s diplomatic status, international communications have been deepened and China has drawn the world’s attention. All of these have given birth to enormous demands of interpreting from Chinese to English. Diplomacy which is used to state a nation’s position and view, and announce the outcome of a talk is one of the important links between countries. Diplomatic language mainly concerns the position and interests of the related nation.The reasons why fuzziness is widely used in diplomatic activities are that first, fuzziness is natural attribute of language, second, fuzziness which is used to answer sensitive questions and harmonize the atmosphere is a communicative strategy in diplomatic activities. Besides, many expressions with Chinese characteristics in Chinese diplomatic language often cause fuzziness to the foreign audience as a result of the cultural differences. Actually, fuzzy language is widely used in various communications and has been studied from different angles.This thesis attempts to probe into the Chinese-English interpreting of diplomatic fuzziness from the perspective of semantic translation and communicative translation. Firstly, the thesis introduces the theoretical framework of the research. Newmark classified text into three major types:’text with expressive function, text with informative function, and text with vocative function. Newmark proposed a method of semantic and communicative translation according to different types of text translation. Newmark thinks that semantic translation should attempt to render, as closely as the semantic and syntactic structures of the second language allow, the exact contextual meaning of the original. Semantic translation focuses on the original author. Whereas, communicative translation attaches great importance to the target readers, and tries to make the translation suitable for the target readers, making the target readers feel the effect as close as possible to that obtained on the readers of the original. Then, this thesis mainly focuses on the realization of diplomatic fuzziness into three types, namely fuzziness realized by hedges, fuzziness realized by fuzzy words and fuzziness realized by expressions with Chinese characteristics. Meanwhile,the thesis analyzes the three realizations based on the data collected, and explores the interpreting methods of fuzziness in diplomatic language under the guidance of semantic and communicative translation. Finally, the thesis concludes that semantic translation is the primary method for the interpreting of diplomatic fuzziness and communicative translation is the subordinate. Moreover, three principles: faithfulness, naturalness and economy, which are applicable in interpreting of fuzzy language in diplomacy, are also pointed out.