Cognitive Context And Translation

Context has a powerful impact on communication and exerts great influence on the generation and interpretation of utterance. Traditionally the study of context mainly emphasizes the functions of the external world from the static angle and ignors the functions of mental activities of human being in communication, such as situation of context cited by Malinowski and register by Halliday. Cognitive context, put forward by Sperber and Wilson in their book Relevance: Communication and Cognition, is a concept which is different from context of traditional views. It is regarded as a psychological structure made up of a series of assumptions that have to be established and developed in the course of interaction of communicators in order to select the correct interpretation. Understanding each discourse needs different contextual factors, so the hearer is supposed to build new context with the discourse proceeding for interpretation, so context is described as chosen and dynamic. Cognitive context stresses the functions of psychological activities of human being in the process of communication from the angle of dynamics and it accords with the feature of dynamics of verbal communication. Translation, as a communicative activity, is greatly closed to context. In the process of translation the translator needs to know the cognitive environments of the author of SL and the reader of TL, then to choose proper expressional forms which can transmit the former's intend and adapt to the cognition of the latter. Therefore, in some sense, translation is the transference of cognitive environment. Traditional context is not powerful enough to explain the practice of translation because it ignores the functions of the subjective initiative of people. The thesis makes the comparison of the explanatory power of cognitive context and traditional context in translation from two aspects: coherence of the translated text and translation unit. There are two approaches involved cognitive context for translation study: cognitive translation and pragmatic translation. Translator is a mediator in the activity of translation. Upon the model of cognitive context and the inferential model of translation, an inferential model of translator's cognition in translation is put forward in the thesis. Approaches of deduction and analysis of examples are adopted for the study of the thesis.