Translating Vagueness? A Study on Translations of Vague Quantifiers in an English-Chinese Parallel Corpus

In this paper we investigate variation in the translation of three vague quantifiers, many, some and a few between English and Chinese. Studies of ‘linguistic vagueness’ (sometimes called ‘language vagueness’ in previous research) regard vagueness as a general phenomenon in language. In this type of study, vagueness is often discussed – but not limited – to indeterminacy of the referential boundary of words. Previous studies of vagueness have generally followed two related – but different – approaches (i) vagueness viewed as pervasive in language and (ii) vagueness viewed as referring to certain expressions that are considered as vague. We refer to the first type as the study of linguistic vagueness, and the second type as the study of pragmalinguistic vagueness. In this study, we focus on the second perspective of vagueness. We use an English/Chinese parallel corpus that contains newspaper articles and literary reviews to explore the translation strategies. Our study shows that each quantifier has a typical translation that follows the scalar implicature in both original and targeted languages. The atypical Chinese variants may be used to translated the same English quantifier; that means, the corresponding translation variant may not necessarily reflect the quantity conveyed in the quantifier(s) of the original language (i.e. English).