Context Of Discourse As Contextual Vision Of Translaiton And Reconstruction Of Textual Coherence In The Target Discourse

Context is first accepted as a social linguistic concept in its long history of development. Linguistic studies of context benefit translation a lot. Obviously, context has become increasingly crucial for translation and translation studies. Some scholars even suggest that an independent contextual vision of translation be established to distinguish context of translation from those of text linguistics, pragmatics and cognitive linguistics, etc. Furthermore, text linguistics is well recommended nowadays by many translation theorists to work as the fundamental framework of an independent and systematic translation approach. As the close combination of text linguistics and translation, some scholars propose that discourse analysis divorced from context will turn translation study into a branch of comparative linguistics, while contextual research cutting itself from discourse analysis will make translation study generalized to be a case study of culture. (Li Yunxing, 2007) Probing into the complicated relationships among discourse, context and translation has thrown light on this thesis: context is never found to be "above" or "beyond" a discourse, but inseparably related to the discourse. Text linguistics assumes that cohesion and coherence are two eccentric properties of discourse. As the basic unit of communication, a discourse must be presumably coherent so as to fulfill an effective role in communication. It is a set of cohesive devices that constitute the coherence of a discourse. Zhang Delu (2001), a renowned text linguist, classifies the devices into two groups: internal cohesive devices and external cohesive devices. The former manifest the overt linguistic connections that link together all the linguistic elements of a discourse and tie them into the whole; the latter denote the underlying semantic relations, i.e. the connectivity and consistency of a discourse with its context of situation and of culture. Absolutely, each coherent discourse is contextually adapted. In view of these, the thesis attempts to transplant context of translation into the soil of discourse, the basic thinking unit of translation, so that contextual elements can be categorized accordingly and translation process will be considered as reconstruction of textual coherence in the target discourse under the constraint of context. The transplanted context is named in this thesis as "context of discourse" in the hope of nourishing and furthering the translation context approach in being. Meanwhile, context of discourse is expected to function as a branch of text translation approach (TTA), and thus reflecting the reasonability and superiority of the trunk.The whole thesis falls into four parts: Chapter One gives a brief introduction to context approaches, including the status quo of its development both at home and abroad, the dynamic trend and its binding process with translation. Then the thesis points out the achievements and deficiencies of the existing approaches to context and makes some comments on them; Chapter Two uncovers the discrepancy between "discourse" and "text", and then generalizes the research focuses of discourse analysis. The last section gives a detailed illustration of all the articles and treatises on translation studies enlightened by text linguistics, and it summarizes the main ideas and propositions in them. Apart from this, it also concludes the significance, research scope and focuses of TTA; Chapter Three has found theoretical support from the above two chapters, and it is thereby logical to arrive at the central concept——context of discourse which is rationally classified from the angle of a translation researcher. It then testifies the assertion that translation of a discourse is actually to reconstruct textual coherence with the target language under the restriction of context of discourse; Chapter Four is the body of the thesis. A thorough and convincing analysis is made and an abundance of instances are cited to explain how context of discourse restricts and influences translators' reconstruction of textual coherence. At last, the thesis comes to a conclusion that the combination of context and discourse conforms to the law of their development and also contributes a lot to both of them. Highly directive as the context of discourse, the subjective role of translators cannot be neglected. On the contrary, it should be given full play to in the process of reconstructing textual coherence under the constraint of context of discourse. Therefore, translators should enhance their contextual awareness and internalize contextual knowledge into their minds in a bid for an effective translation.