Revisiting The Second World War From The Perspective Of Context Of Situation

Context of situation theory is the core part of contextual theory within the framework of Systemic-functional linguistics proposed by M.A.K Halliday,who argues that there are systematic connections between forms of language and three specific features of context.According to Halliday,the three features which are defined as field,tenor and mode serve as the role of construing the social background of a text,so context of situation theory is often used for discourse analysis and translation studies.The Second World War,the book that helps its author Winston Churchill win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953,comprehensively depicts the major events in World War II.This book has earned itself a great many readers both at home and abroad by disclosing some confidential information and letters that are exchanged during that period and manifesting some historical events from the perspective of the then British prime minister.It is this unique perspective and a great quantity of firsthand documents which are covered in this book that have endowed itself with high historical value.Therefore,The Second World War is quite a hit in Western countries in the 20 th century.Even in China,there are six translated editions.Certainly,all the Chinese versions greatly help Chinese readers learn about World War II and Winston Churchill.However,these Chinese versions are exceedingly similar in content,even though their translators are different.What’s worse,some parts of source text are mistranslated or missed out to different degrees.Accordingly,within the framework of SFL,this thesis attempts to do the practical study on the source text of The Second World War and to examine its Yilin’s translated version from the perspective of context of situation with qualitative method,in order to identify the problems and deficiencies in Yilin’s version and to probe into the best approaches to translation and retranslation.Additionally,under the guidance of context of situation theory,the author of this thesis intends to present her own retranslated version to investigate how the theory is applied to retranslation study.In this thesis,26 typical examples have been selected from the source text of Vol.1 and Vol.6 of The Second World War,and a detailed comparative study has been made between the source text and Yilin’s translation from the perspective of field,tenor and mode.From the perspective of field,the thesis draws the conclusion that the failure of field equivalence between target text and source text manifests itself in mistranslation and loss of information.The author attempts to deal with these problems under the guidance of context of situation theory.From the perspective of tenor,the thesis finds that the failure of tenor equivalence between target text and source text manifests itself in misuse of modality and the inaccuracy of attitudinal words.Under the guidance of appraisal theory of SFL,this thesis analyzes the attitudinal meanings of the attitudinal words and further revises them in an accurate way.From the perspective of mode,the thesis finds that the failure of mode equivalence between target text and source text manifests itself in incoherence and illogical clauses.As English is a hypotactic language while Chinese is a paratactic one,there is supposed to be some alterations in English-Chinese translation and such translation strategies as inversion,division and conversion could be applied appropriately.