英语论文网

According to Cambridge Business English Examination Outline, Business English is for business people who need to, or will soon need to, use English in their work. It may also be used by adult students who will be entering the world of business at the end of their course of studies. Ellis, M. & Johnson, C. give a clear definition of Business English in Teaching Business English in 1994. “Business English must be seen in the overall context of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), as it shares the important elements of needs analysis, syllabus design, and material selection and development which are common to all fields of work in ESP. As with other varieties of ESP, Business English implies the definition of a specific language corpus and emphasis on particular kinds of communication in a specific context.” To my knowledge, Business English is English that used for business purpose. It is the basic tool for businessmen to communicate with others while doing the international trades. Generally speaking, the language of Business English has its own main five features. It is very accurate, brief, concrete, clear and courteous.

3. The function of vague language in Business English and its translation approaches

3.1 The function of vague language

Business English need to follow the principles of cooperation and politeness due to the uncertainties of business activities. Therefore we need to use vague language for the reason that appropriate use of vague language can achieve good communicative effect. As we all know, vagueness is one of the essential features of natural languages. Because of some reasons, businessmen don’t want to expose their real purposes to their counterparts in some international negotiations. They often employ vague language to express their opinions on these occasions, and in this way they can make the communication continue smoothly and win more profit for them.

3.1.1 The definition of vague language

People have a long study of vague language. We often consider Peirce is as the first person to put forward the notion of vague language. He tried to formulate the notion in an accurate way as follows: “A proposition is vague where there are possible states of things concerning which it is intrinsically uncertain whether, had they been contemplated by the speaker, he would have regarded them as excluded or allowed by the proposition. By intrinsically uncertain we mean not uncertain in consequence of any ignorance of the interpreter, but because the speaker’s habits of language were indeterminate; so that one day he would regard the proposition as excluding, another as admitting, those states of things. Yet this must be understood to have reference to what might be deduced from a perfect knowledge of his state of mind; for it is precisely because these questions never did, or did not frequently, present themselves that his habit remained indeterminate”. (Peirce, 1902:748) Obviously, Peirce defines vagueness similarly as fuzziness. Bertrand Russell, a British philosopher, wrote an article entitled Vagueness in 1923. In this article, he indicates that all language is more or less vague. He defines vagueness as “a representation is vague when the relation of the repr本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。