The Influences Of Context On English-Chinese Translation

Context plays a significant role in translating. Only by taking intra-linguistic context and extra-linguistic context factors into account can translators understand accurately and express properly. This thesis illustrates the influences of context on English-Chinese translation by the instances of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, for Harry Potter series symbolize westerners’ dream and imagination of magic and by means of analyzing the context, we could grasp their profound mysteries. It introduces the overseas and domestic relevant research dynamic, summarizes the concept of context, probes into the classification of context and then theoretically illustrates the influences of context on English-Chinese translation. From the perspective of pragmatics, this thesis classifies context factors as intra-linguistic context and extra-linguistic context. Intra-linguistic context consists of phrasal context, sentence context and paragraphs discourse context while extra-linguistic context is composed of situational context and cultural context. Finally, it demonstrates the influences of Intra-linguistic context on translation according to the syntactic, coherent and logical relevance between the vocabularies, sentences and paragraphs and illustrates the influences of extra-linguistic context on the translation respectively based on situational factors and cultural factors, by means of analyzing examples.