Dialogue Translation From The Perspective Of Contextual Adaptation: A Case Study Of The E-C Translation On “The World To Come”

Jim Sheperd’s short novel “The World to Come” gives a detailed portrait of lives in the isolated farming community of Schoharie, New York in the 1850 s. Dialogues of this novel play an important role in characterize the figures, reveal the relationship between characters and forward the plot. Because the story has a special background, all the dialogues are produced in a particular context, readers who are not familiar with the cultural background will find it difficult to understand because they can’t interpret the context. So translators must attach importance of the interpretation and transformation of the context in translation.The concept of context was advanced by Malinowski, he pointed out that context including situational context and cultural context. With the development of context theory, Bakhtin discovered the dynamic quality of context, and Belgian linguistic Verschueren advanced the adaptation theory. Verschueren wrote in his book that the using of language is a dynamic process: the context was formed in the process of communication and it will change in pace with the development of communication, so that the purpose of communication can be satisfied. Therefore, interpret the original text’s context and reconstruct it in the translated text is very important, because it will affect the dialogues’ expression. Based on Verschueren’s classification of context, this essay discussed the reconstruction of linguistic context and communicative context in dialogue translation.In the first part, it will analyze the features of this novel’s dialogues and present my translation principles. In the second part, it will analyze the linguistic context’s influence of text meaning. It will make a detail analyze of the cohesion, intertextuality and sequencing in linguistic context, and bring forward my translation strategies. In the third part, it will analyze the mental world, the social world, the physical world in communicative context, state how they affect the dialogue’s meaning, and bring forward my translation strategies. In the last part of this thesis, it dialectically reviews and summarizes the above mentioned issues and points out that interpret the context to understand the text and reconstruct the context in the translated text in a way that the target language readers can interpret will help the readers understand the text in a better way.