Context And Wording In E-C Translation

Since "context" was raised by B. Malinowski in 1923, the notion has drawn wide attention among scholars interested in communication, and the scope of study has expanded its province from pure linguistics to the situation in which a linguistic expression takes place, and to the social and cultural background of communication. Since translation is a kind of inter-lingual and cross-cultural communication, more and more translators have realized the important role context plays in translation.Most of the previous studies of context and translation focus on source language text at sentence level. Since words are free minimal units in communication and most mistakes made in translation are at word level, this thesis strives to investigate how context interplays with wording in translation, particularly in English-Chinese translation, for disparities of wording in these two languages are immense.Three kinds of contexts are distinguished: intra-lingual context, para-lingual context and extra-lingual context and each is subdivided into smaller contexts. Among the three kinds of contexts, the roles intra-lingual and extra-lingual contexts play in translation have been explored by many translators, while there are very few studies concerning how para-lingual context affects translation. A research into this field is a supplement to the previous studies. The writer of the thesis tries to provide abundant examples, mostly found in different literary translation versions of the same source language works, to illustrate how different interpretations of the source language contexts and (or) the target language contexts lead to different wordings in translation. It is through such contrasts that the author draws the readers' attention to the important role contexts plays in wording in translation and presents a powerful tool that will help wording in translation.