ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 offers a brief literature review of the study of fuzzy language from a cognitive perspective in China and in the Western world, as well as a discussion of the translation studies of fuzzy language. “Fuzzy language in literature and translation” is a worthwhile and yet very complicated issue to research on. It is often an issue to be approached from the cognitive perspective. Given that there is no direct access to the cognitive operations within the mind of the translator, the researcher will be forced back into the description of the product rather than the process. Based on this understanding, the monograph gives testimony to the fact that the fuzziness of language in literary translation mainly hinges on the translator’s fuzzy interpretation of the language he/she reads in a literary work, and the correct understanding of this is by way of case studies in which fuzzy utterances are analysed in both their source and target language environments. In this connection, the monograph’s use of the popular English work of fiction The Da Vinci Code and its two Chinese translations as the object of its case study is a good choice and has well served its purpose.
