A Comparative Study Of Two Chinese Versions Of Steve Jobs From The Perspective Of Contextual Correlates Of Adaptability In Translation

Scholars at home and abroad have been studying the classification and role of context mainly from the perspectives of systemic-functional linguistics, pragmatics, and cognitive linguistics. Translation is to convey meaning, while meaning is restricted by context; therefore, it is necessary to handle translating in context. As a complex activity, the translation task should be set in a certain situation, where quality of translation is definitely affected by the contextual correlates.This thesis aims to study the influence of contextual correlates in translation. Combined contextual correlates of adaptability proposed by Verschueren and translation process, mode of contextual correlates of adaptability in translation is put forward. On the basis of this mode, two Chinese versions of Steve Jobs will be analyzed as a case to explore the role of contextual correlates in translation. In terms of context of source text and target text, communicative and linguistic context, the choice of language, translation strategies, and techniques from the two Chinese versions of Steve Jobs reveal the influence of different contextual correlates.The finding shows that, at the stage of interpreting source text the translator should pay more attention to the context of source text for better understanding; while at the stage of producing target text, the translator should be concerned about potential target readers. The study also shows that there is no single standard to justify which translation strategies, or techniques are correct because each of them mostly depends upon certain contextual correlates. There is a tendency that acceptance of target readers is regarded as a key point for translation criticism. The implication of the study is that translators should raise the awareness of translation context. They should be responsible for a better translation with high quality as well.