Contextualized Semantic Decoding And Recoding

he concept of "context" was first put forward by B.Malinowski,a Polish-born anthropologist,in his essay The Problems of Meanings in Primitive Languages,a supplement to the book The Meaning of Meaning by Ogden&Richards.Then it attracted the attention of the linguists and was widely discussed in the linguistic circle.The main functions of context include restriction and interpretation.English words feature polysemy,which causes difficulties in translation.As a result,context plays an important role in distinguishing and translating the word meanings.This is a translation report based on the Chinese translation of an excerpt from Mathew Walker’s Why We Sleep,an informative text,introducing the importance of the sleep from a scientific point of view.This book covers the knowledge from many professional fields such as psychology,medicine,brain science,neuroscience and genetics.The author of the book prefers to use some vivid words and phrases which include rich information.The book also covers a lot of background knowledge,so the understanding of the text is quite difficult.As a result,the author of the report decides to study how to distinguish and translate the word meanings based on the context by the translation practice.Based on the classification of context put forward by He Zhaoxiong and the features of the original text,the author classifies the context into linguistic knowledge at lexical,syntactical and textual levels and extra-linguistic knowledge including situational knowledge and background knowledge.By translating the selected chapters into Chinese and analyzing the typical examples,the author studies the important role of context in distinguishing and translating word meanings.Some translation methods are also adopted to help the target readers know the text better.This report reviews the previous studies of context,combines them with practical translation and finds the important role of context in determining word meanings.It also perfects the classification of context and summarizes some translation methods with a wish of providing some new ideas for the translation of the similar texts later.