Pragmatic Functions of Vague Expressions in Legal Texts and Its Translation Techniques

Abstract

As the international communications are more frequent in the current situation, it is necessary for China to both better understand the law in other countries and let the world have a clearer idea of the law in China so as to avoid some unnecessary disputes.As vague expression is a common language phenomenon in legal texts, this article focuses on its pragmatic functions to explain the necessity of vague expression in legal texts and intends to explore translation technique to deal with the vague expression in legal texts.It is found that vague expression has the following functions: 1) generalization and maintaining conciseness of the texts 2) maintaining stability of law 3) maintaining the ultimate accuracy of law enforcement and justice. And there are three translation techniques to deal with the vague expression: 1) literal translation 2) addition and omission 3) conversion between precision and vagueness.