A Study On Literary Translation From Contextual Perspective

The concept of context has long been studied by the linguists. Different linguistic schools have done researches on context from different perspectives. The concept of context is an especially important subject studied in pragmatics. In recent years, with the development of pragmatics, pragmatic approaches have been adopted in the explanation of translation procedure, process and product. Literary translation, as one kind of translation, has an especially close relation with pragmatics and the context. Here the thesis will study literary translation from the contextual perspective and examples from the Chinese version of pride and prejudice by Sun Zhili will be used here for argumentation.The thesis first devotes a brief introduction to the whole content; then, in chapter one, it gives basic introduction to context in two aspects. In one aspect, it expounds the traditional view on context and in the other aspect, it expounds the relevance-theoretic view on context. Chapter two discusses the influence that traditional context has on literary translation. It first gives introduction to literary translation and then discusses context and literary translation in Mr. Cheng Yongsheng's theory. Chapter three is the main part of the thesis. It discusses context and literary translation in relevance theory. It first gives introduction to relevance theory in four aspects and then it discusses the problems of translatability and untranslatability with the use of relevance theory in which cognitive context is the core. The fourth chapter gives discussion on the subtle complexity of the translator's task. It explores this in four aspects: the translator's subjectivity, the translator's style and so on so forth. The last part, conclusion, sums up the foregoing chapters and concludes that context plays a very significant part in literary translation and it helps a lot in one's translating work. To be a qualified translator like Mr. Sun Zhili, one must know contextual knowledge as much as possible. Only through this way, can the goal of translation be best achieved.