On Contextual Awareness Of Body Language Translation

Body language, as a form of nonverbal communication, plays a very important role in communication. A majority of body language is cultural-bounded, which definitely proposes many difficulties and obstructions in cross-cultural communication. Therefore, the importance of body language translation to accelerate intercultural communication is increasingly embodied. "No context, no text." (Lyons) It is obviously not difficult to perceive the importance of context from this English saying. Equally, the translation of body language is also indispensable from context. Translators should always keep contextual awareness in the process of translation. Hatim and Mason advocated three dimensions of context closely related to translation, which will be regarded as the theoretical foundation to probe into body language translation. Hatim and Mason's theory provides us with a new perspective to translation practice and criticism of description of body language between Chinese and English.Besides introduction and conclusion, the thesis composes of five chapters. Chapter one is an introduction to the general study of body language. On one hand, it clarifies some basic concepts used in the study of body language where the definition is given, characteristics are shown and distinctions between "body language", "nonverbal communication", and "gestures", etc. are made; on the other hand, it analyzes the translatability of body language description, reviews the previous studies of description of body language, probes into the problems in the body language translation process and reveals the reasons why those problems exist.Chapter two firstly introduces some basic information of context including definition and classification of context and then correlates context into the translation of body language, revealing the non-detachability of context to the translation of body language. Additionally, the author manifests two main functions of context to body language translation—interpretative function and restrictive function. This chapter is also devoted to the introduction of the communication theory of Hatim and Mason, which will be used as the theoretical support of the thesis. Hatim and Mason advanced three dimensions of contextual system: communicative dimension, pragmatic dimension and semiotic dimension, which contributes a lot to the research of body language translation.Chapter three is the communicative approach to body language translation. The author probes into it from two levels—the user related varieties (dialect) including geographical dialect, temporal dialect and social dialect etc. and the use-related varieties (register) including field of discourse, mode of discourse and tenor of discourse. The abundant examples are used to illustrate how body language translation is influenced by context under the terms mentioned above.Chapter four is the pragmatic approach to body language translation. Hatim believes that translation is a special communication activity and many pragmatic factors possess the power to influence the fulfillment of the special communicative purpose. To illustrate this point, the concept of speech act and cooperative principle are chosen as two major ones. For the speech act aspect, three kinds of speech acts are identified: locutionary act, illocutionary act and perlocutinary act. The author reveals how to transfer description of body language with the three speech acts from the source language to the target language. For the cooperative principle aspect, the four maxims (maximum of quantity, maximum of quality, maximum of relevance and maximum of manner) advocated by Grice are used to guide body language translation.Chapter five is the semiotic approach to body language translation. Body language possesses the functions of typical signs and has an important location in Semiology. On the semiotic dimension, under the guidance of Hatim and Mason's theory, the author takes semiotic theory put forward by Morris as a foundation, regards the semiotic approach to meaning as a core and considers body language as semiotic entity as a basis to guide the translation of body language. In a word, the author attempts to deal with body language translation from the three meanings of a sign - designative meaning, linguistic meaning and pragmatic meaning.Lastly, the author concludes the whole thesis by summarizing the key ideas of the thesis, highlighting its possible contributions to the research of body language translation and the limitations and thereof, hopes this study can give some help for further research in this field.