Context And Word Selection In English Literature Translating

Context as the language environment can be divided into linguistic context, situational context and cultural context, which has a significant impact on English literary translating. With its help, a translator may better understand the meaning and eliminate ambiguity of a word. During translating, translators may face such difficulties in words selection as lexical gap, polysemy, and under or over translating. Under this situation, translator can take appropriate strategies to resolve these problems, including taking advantage of the linguistic context to attain a comprehensive analysis of the meaning of a word; to disambiguate according the situational context or to add annotations based on cultural context, etc. By understanding the contexts and the difficulties in words selection in English literature translating, aware of the importance of the combination of the two, it will help the translator fully grasp the translated text and improve translation quality. However, exchanges between the two countries should be promoted so as to narrow the gap and avoid those translation problems.