Research On The Types Of Translation Context

Translation, as a kind of special inter-language communicative activity, involves a lot of contextual factors. Translation context restricts the translation activities, in turn, the translation activity depends on the translation context. This thesis concentrates on the classification of translation context and tries to explore it in detail. Firstly, it summarizes the current researches on context and translation context at home and abroad. Owing to different understandings of context connotation, there have not been a unified definition and classification of translation context. Centering on the three groups of relationships between language and context, language and translation, and translation and context, the thesis attempts to make a systematic and comprehensive exploration into translation context itself and then reclassify the translation context.Under the guidance of the holistic view of contextualism——a very important and valuable philosophical thought, this thesis mainly tries to determine the objects of translation context based on the analysis of the structure of these objects. First, we’ll distinguish between the "level" and the "aspect" of language, with "level" including the word, the sentence, the paragraph and the discourse; and "aspect" including the sound, the grammar, the meaning and the use of language. Based on this distinction, plus the disciplinary factors, the objects of translation context are identified, namely, the types of translation context are determined. Here translation context is divided into twenty-four subtypes. Considering that context is an extremely complicated issue, and the exploration into all the twenty-four types of translation context is too huge a project for the present paper, the author will mainly discuss four general types of translation context in detail.In addition, this thesis lists a lot of typical and specific examples involving both Chinese and English texts and tries to show the great importance of different translation contexts in the process of translation, and it stresses that a translator should take these translation contexts into consideration in order to get the accurate connotation and reproduce the meaning and style of the original text.