Contextual Analysis In Translating Anthropological Texts From English To Chinese:A Report On The Translation Of Thinking Like A Climate

The exacerbation of climate change around the globe brings about intense droughts,water scarcity,severe fires,rising sea levels,flooding,melting polar ice,catastrophic storms and declining biodiversity,endangering all aspects of human life.To propel the exchange of information about climate response,the translator translates the book Thinking Like a Climate:Governing a City in Times of Environmental Change by anthropologist Hannah Knox into Chinese.With anthropological factors showing a variation across countries and regions,the context of the anthropological text should be analyzed and reproduced during its translation to better explain that variation to target readers who live under conditions different from those of the author and original readers.Because of this concern,a model of contextual analysis should be found for this case and the following questions should be answered:What are the exact elements that should be considered during the contextual analysis of the source text?What are the possible strategies and techniques for a translator to reproduce the original context in the target text?As a case study,this report employs the context theory developed by Malinowski,Firth,Halliday,Hatim,Mason and other linguists which proposes a three-dimensional model of contextual analysis.First,on the communicative dimension,the translator examines features of idiolect and dialect of the participants of the original text,including the author,the speaker of an utterance,etc.,to reproduce them in the target text.Register analysis is also indispensable on this dimension for the translator to realize equivalence between the original text and the target text’s field,tenor,and mode.Second,on the pragmatic dimension,the translator figures out the illocutionary act of the original text and explicates the underlying implicatures.Third,on the semiotic dimension,the translator analyzes grammatical features of the original text and preserves them by shifting transitivity and adding conjunctions in the target text.For extralinguistic factors,the translator adds auxiliary information by techniques of annotations or footnotes in the translation to reproduce the original context.In short,the context theory is applicable in the translation of anthropological texts and helps the translator to analyze the context of the original text in an orderly manner.