Influence Of Tempo-spatial Location Upon Translation: Perspective Of The Theory Of Context

Borrowing considerably from context theories and systemic functional grammar, Catfordintroduced the idea of context into translation studies in1965, and has made explorativeresearches into contextual problems in translation ever since. As its research scope hasexpanded from pure linguistics to communicative situation and reached further into the socialand cultural background of communication, contextual analysis in translation studies hasdrawn wide attention in translatology area and gradually becomes a research hotspot in thelate1990s.The present study examines the strong effects of spatiotemporal location over translation.Under the framework of the trichotomous categorization of context, this thesis upholds that“spatiotemporal location” falls into the categories of both situational context and culturalcontext, and provides abundant examples, mostly extracted from classical works of Chineseand English literature and other sources, to vividly illustrate how spatiotemporal locationinfluences translation subjects and translation process at large.Time and place, indispensable to any communicative activities, are vital contextualfactors in translation activities, which are a kind of inter-lingual and cross-culturalcommunication by nature. Many linguists like J. Lyons (1977), He Zhaoxiong (1989) and HuZhuanglin (1994) point out that time and place are situation-related factors and that they exerta direct and deep impact on communicative activities. The present study, on the basis offormer research achievements, walks a step further to regard spatiotemporal location as acrucial cultural factor, since authors and translators, as participants of the inter-lingual andcross-cultural communication, are inevitably under the strong influence of the social, political,economic and cultural conditions of a certain historical period of time in a certain place whentheir spatiotemporal location changes. It is through contrasts of translation cases that thepresent thesis draws the readers’ attention to the vital role spatiotemporal location plays intranslation and justifies its appropriateness of the theoretical framework to assignspatiotemporal location into both situational context and cultural context. Language, serving as a vivid portrayal of the changing world, varies from time to timeand from place to place. So it is the same with general social and cultural conditions underwhich authors and translators carry out activities in literary and artistic creation. Thus,translators have to make both a synchronic and a diachronic analysis of contextual variablesin translation process.