A Study On Text Translation Of Classical Chinese Poetry From The Context Perspective

With the development of text linguistics, the view of taking text as a semantic unit isattracting more and more attention in the field of linguistics and translation. Many translatorsbegin to take text as the basic unit in translation practice. However, text is produced in aspecial context, which exerts a great influence on the creation and interpretation of utteranceand plays an important role in communication. However, in the translation practice, thefactors of context as well as their influence on translation are often neglected. Most of thetranslators transfer the words, phrases or sentences into another language in isolation toachieve the meaning equivalence, but fail to take the whole text as a unit and take context intoconsideration.As the most difficult literature style, classical Chinese poetry contains abundant culturalimplications and is composed in certain context. In the published versions, there are somemisinterpretation and illogical expressions, which result in the absence of cultural andsituational factors. On account of the absence of contextual factors, this thesis will analyzemany texts of classical Chinese poetry as well as their English versions based on the theory ofcontext, especially the contextual perspective of systemic functional linguistics. It aims to findout the contextual factors in classical Chinese poetry and prove the functions of context ontranslation practice, and it will propose a mode of translating process, which will find out abetter way to solve the problem of cultural and situational absence in classical Chinese poetrytranslation.Based on the theory study and sample analysis, this thesis gets such research findings:There are three different contexts having influence on the process and result of translation,which are cultural context, situational context and context of co-text. Cultural context hasrestrictive and coordinating functions on the text translation; Situational context has interpretive and restrictive functions on the understanding of original text; And context ofco-text restricts the translation of title. According to the research findings, this thesisproposes that translation of classical Chinese poetry should include four processes: analysisof the source text; process of transferring; process of restructuring; and process of testing. Inthe whole process of translating, the text unit and contextual factors should be taken intoconsideration to achieve translation purpose.This thesis is a tentative application of linguistic theory in translating practice. Thisthesis aims to bring some enlightenment for the research and practice of translation, andprovides a reference for the translators to improve the quality of translation efficiently.