On The Importance Of Contextual Analysis On Translation

As a way of social communication, contextualization is put forward by Gumperz who takes contextualization as a process of constantly using, building and breaking context. Lyons views contextualization as a process of context connection and coherence. This perspective could help people understand the context properly. As for translation, a cross-culture activity, contextualization analysis could be significant for translators to decode and recode the context.The thesis tries to figure out the importance of contextualization on translation through case analysis. The novel Seed of Hope is set in Britain of the 16th century. The contexts in this novel are difficult for Chinese readers to fully understand. It is necessary for the translator to decode the context so as to help the readers to understand the meaning of the novel. Upon summary of previous studies and the characteristics of this novel, the thesis attempts to classify contextual cases into the linguistic ones and the non-linguistic ones. By adopting contextualization analysis, the translator would be able to gather information about the political, economic and cultural elements in a certain historical time, thus improving the accuracy and fluency of the translated texts.