Context In Translation:With Examples From Keynes Resurrected? Saving Civilization,Again And Again

Some translators fail to pay sufficient attention to context in the process of translation,which would lead to misunderstandings of word meanings,failures in revealing words’ connotations,incoherence in the context,or logical contradictions.Thus,to examine the context of the original text and take it into account in translation is an important prerequisite for a translator to understand the original text and produce a reasonable translation.The thesis consists of two major parts:the translation project(with the original juxtaposed with the translation)and the translation commentary.The original text is an academic paper,concise in its language and rigorous in its logic,which requires the translator to understand the context in order to make clear the logic and determine the word meanings.The commentary part starts with a brief review of how the context theory has been developed both at home and abroad and goes on to focus its analysis on the roles of context or linguistic context in translation according to the specific translation project.Geoffrey Leech,an English linguist,once put forward that context has three roles,namely eliminating certain ambiguities or multiple meanings in the message,indicating the referents of certain types of word and supplying information which the speaker/writer has omitted through ellipsis.Directed by these three roles and based on the specific translation project,the thesis holds that in many cases,context can be relied on to eliminate ambiguities of word meanings,clarify words’ connotations,determine the referents of certain types of words,render explicit some hidden logic among or inside sentences,achieve semantic integrity,and decide whether a word is positive,negative or neutral.It is expected that the study might encourage translators to pay more attention to context.The above-mentioned translation skills might be of some help for them to thoroughly understand the context in their translation practices and generate goodtranslations.