Cognitive Context And Translation Of News English

Journalistic language, as a fairly effective way of information transmitting, is exerting a great effect on our everyday life and people's style of writing and therefore is worthy of our constant attention. This study aims at rendering a contextual exploration of the translation of news English in a comprehensive, systematic and representative manner.Translation, as a communicative activity, takes place in a special context. Without context, there will be no good understanding of the original language and no output of the target language. Traditional context mainly emphasizes the functions of the external world from the static angle and ignores the subjective initiative of people in communication. Cognitive context, put forward by Sperber and Wilson, is a psychological construct made up of a series of assumptions that have to be chosen with progress of communication by searching for the relevance, which can explain the mental activities of human beings in communication. Although there are differences between the two kinds of context, they are not completely opposite to each other. Some of the elements in traditional context are included in cognitive context. The role of traditional context in news English translation has been explored, while there are very few studies on how cognitive context affects news English translation. It is hoped that a research into this field will be a supplement to the previous studies and provide a keen insight into news English translation research.Based on an analysis of the nature of news English as a way of communication and an analysis of both traditional context and cognitive context, this thesis mainly discusses functions of cognitive context in news English translation by providing abundant examples. In the process of translation the translator needs not only to take the objective contextual factors into consideration but also to know the cognitive contexts of the writer of source language and the reader of target language, then to choose proper forms of expression which can transmit the writer's intention and adapt to the cognition of the latter.The thesis is composed of six parts. The first part is the introduction to this thesis, including the significance, the objectives and research questions of the present study. Research method and rough structure of the whole thesis are also given. Chapter One is a review of context studies. By illustrating the traditional view of context studies and its limitations, cognitive context is introduced. It gives a detailed description of the features of cognitive context and its significance to translation study. Chapter Two is an overview of news English. It introduces the definition and characteristics of news English and points out that news report is a communication process. Chapter Three is the emphasis of the whole thesis, devoted to explaining the function of cognitive context in translation of news English. With updated data collected from the printed media and the web, it probes into the role of cognitive context in translating news English words. Chapter Four focuses on some concrete translating strategies concerning news English and provides many examples to discuss how to get a better understanding of news English in terms of cognitive context and choose appropriate strategies. The last part is conclusion. Besides a brief summary, some limitations of the research and suggestions for further study are also proposed.