On Contextural Awareness In Literary Translation

Hatim and Mason first advanced three dimensions of context. Professor Liao Qiyi introduced their theory and expounded it in English-Chinese translation practice. Based on Professor Liao Qiyi's work, this thesis makes a systematic descriptive analysis of the value of Hatim and Mason's context theory on the translation practice and criticism of literary works between Chinese and English.Context plays a decisive role in the understanding and expression of translation. It possesses various attributes and rich functions. Context is generally classified into linguistic, situational and cultural context. Dealing with translation as a part of cross-cultural communication, modern linguists began to regard literary context and its linguistic signs as units of communication, and stressed the value of context to literary translation. Malinowski proposed a context theory in translation and established a theoretic basis for its development. Following him, Hatim and Mason first related context with such linguistic concepts as register, pragmatics and social semiotics, and advanced three dimensions of contextual system: communicative dimension, pragmatic dimension and semiotic dimension.The author of this thesis holds that Hatim and Mason's theory is very instructive to the practice and criticism of literary translation. Literary language has its own features: it is an aesthetic language, aiming at creating some form of beauty; it is also a language abound in figures of speech. A literally faithful translation is not a faithful translation in its real sense. In literary translation, the translator must on one hand reproduce the imaginary and aesthetic features of the source text, and on the other hand take into full consideration the language rules and cultural psychology of the target language readers. This makes context all the more important to literary translation.