Context And Translation

All on the earth is in the process of changing, which results in the language changes. The primitive meaning may be narrowed, broadened or completely altered in the process of being used. The historical periods affect people's choice of expressions in communicating and endow some utterances with special meanings from the point of view of today's readers.Words are closely related to us, they are not only the tool to record great historical events and convey peoples' intelligence, but also the way to mark the progress of society. However,word is the most active and changeable factor in language change, each word when used in a new context is a new word. Therefore, the relation between context and word meaning, between context and language is self-evident.Context is a set of contextual factors that influence the conveyance of meaning and its expression. Translation is to find the counterpart of the source language in the target language, which is the interlinguistic transference of information. To achieve this purpose, context plays an important role. Translation is in effect the transfer of context. Centering on the close relation between context and translation, this paper gives a brief introduction of context, including its definition, history and classification. Then the paper discusses the explanatory, restricting and selecting functions of context in accurate understanding of word meaning and translation. The focus of the paper is on the concept of historical context as well as its influence on meaning, phonetic, grammar and translation. The paper also shows that it is important to analyze meanings ofwords and word selection in translation by means of synchronic and diachronic analyses.Through analyzing the diachronic change in word meaning the author indicates that historical context is vital to semantics: semantic evolution leads to the formation of semantic chains which are composed of some semantic links. Translators are supposed to take into account each link of the chain, and make careful analysis before the right and accurate word selection is made. This paper argues accordingly that in translation, semantic analysis should be diachronic while semantic selection synchronic.