Context In Translating From English To Chinese

Context has been studied in various fields of learning, among which translation is one of them. The dependability of translation on context lies in the following three aspects of the translation process: the understanding of the source text, the transmitting skills between the two languages in question, and the producing of a sound and adequate target text.This thesis, focusing on the importance of context in translating from English to Chinese, falls in five parts:Chapter one introduces the development and classification of context by various schools and the kinds of context this thesis will discuss?linguistic context, situational context, personal idiolect and the context of the target language;Chapter two discusses the role context plays in understanding the source text. In this chapter, the main topic is the different kinds of meaning and how context may help in determining them, for meaning is the center of message transmitting process. Here meaning includes not only the semantic meaning as studied in traditional and functional semantics but also the pragmatic meaning which focuses on how contextual features determine or influence the interpretation of utterances and takes into consideration the intention of the speaker. This chapter also explains the relationship between grammar and context in translating from English to Chinese. Grammatical analysis is very important in understanding the source text, but it is not final, for the same syntactic structure sometimes carry different interpretations, and the syntactical ambiguity can only be removed by studying into the context.Chapter three discusses the function of context in producing the target text. It gives a general introduction of the target language context, including the linguistic and cultural contexts of the target language and the cultural reality of the target readers, which ensures that the target text exists in its own right and gains new life among the target readers and target language and culture;Chapter four mainly discusses the major problems relating to context in producing an adequate target text. It stresses the importance of recognizing the differences between the source and target languages and cultures, and explores theoretically and practically some questions relating to context in the translating process such as the reasons of the non-existence of word-for-word equivalence between two languages, how context consciousness helps a translator to recognize an idiom or a set phrase, the semantic and syntactic adjustments according to the target context, the stylistic equivalence, the problem of cultural gap and the strategies for it. Chapter five is the conclusion.