Translating In Cognitive Context

As the English idiom goes, "No context, no text", and it is also true that no context, no translation. Context has a powerful impact on communication and exerts great influence on the generation and interpretation of utterance. The theory of context was put forward by the Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Kasper Malinowski in 1923 and has been under discussion with the change from the perspective of traditional context to cognitive context. The traditional study of context mainly emphasizes the functions of the external world from the static angle but neglects the functions of mental activities of interlocutors in communication. To deal with the problems which can not be solved by traditional context in discourse understanding and interpretation, English scholar Dan Sperber and French scholar Deirdre Wilson advanced the notion of cognitive context in their book Relevance: Communication and Cognition published in 1986. Cognitive context 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 proper interpretation. This process of understanding could be divided into two parts: 1) the speaker restricts the hearer's cognitive context; 2) the hearer chooses and extends the cognitive context, so cognitive context is described as chosen and dynamic rather than static and given. It stresses the functions of psychological activities of subjects in the process of communication.Translation, as a communicative activity, is closely related to context. From the angle of relevance theory, two manifest-inferential processes(including source text understanding and target text constructing) and three communicators are involved in the process of translation—the source text writer, the translator, and the target text reader. The cognitive context of both the original writer and the target readers has some intervening effects on the translator in the process of translation. The translator, as reader and re-writer, has to reconstruct the equivalent cognitive context for target language through seeking proper encoding way, so as to present the intended meaning of the original writer. Based on the model of, cognitive context offered by Xiong Xueliang, the author sets up an inferential model of cognitive context in the process of translation. In this model, context is divided into three parts: situational element, working memory and long-term memory. In the process of translation, the translator decodes the signs of the original text to get their conventional meanings, and then he deduces their implicit meanings by selecting the proper context. In this way, the equivalent cognitive context in target language is reconstructed and the implication of the original writer is presented to the assumed target readers.