A Study Of Sense And Context From The Perspective Of The Interpretive Theory Of Translation

The English version of Zhu Rongji Meets the Press has been published abroad in2011by Oxford University Press and at home in2012by People’s Publishing House. The first draft has been finished by a translating group with Lawrence Lau as its core. Mei Zuanyue has proofread and polished the draft. Other five experts on translation have revised and worked out the final version. The publication of this book has set a good example for the translation of political texts from Chinese into English, and has provided excellent materials for translation studies.The interpretive theory of translation has been put forward by Danica Seleskovitch, a famous interpreter and translation theoretician from France, in the1960s. According to this theory, translation is a kind of communication at the level of text or discourse. And the primary task of translation is the conveying the sense rather than a mere rendition of the concrete words. The process of translation can be divided into three procedures: comprehension, de-verbalization, and re-expression. Knowledge of language and cognitive complements are both important to achieve a perfect translation. Some researchers of the Paris School, represented by Jean Delisle, have proved that the interpretive theory can serve as a guide for translators.With the interpretive theory as the theoretical framework and the English version of Zhu Rongji Meets the Press as the research text, this thesis aims at exploring how context affects comprehension of the original text and re-expression of translation texts, and what these effects are. Verbal communication is a process in which context plays an important role. And in this process, translators have to make some choice, adjustment, adaptation, etc. among various contextual factors. This thesis tried to reveal how the whole process works in the framework of the interpretive theory.