Interpretive Role Of Cognitive Contextual Parameters To Meaning In The Translation Of All The Old Knives

This is a translation commentary of All the Old Knives,which is a mystery spy novel that demands its readers to infer the storyline.And the author described the plot in a veiled writing style that made the novel even hard to understand,especially for some meaning vagueness in it.Context can play an important role in semantic reasoning,so the paper chooses to decode meaning from the perspective of context theory.The paper introduces the concept of context and how the context theory has undergone an upgrading process,developing from a static concept to a dynamic cognitive level.And at this moment,the cognitive context places more stress on the communication subject(actually the translator here).The text features of the novel decide that the translator has to explore the textual context of the novel,the writing context of the author and the cultural context of the source language and combine them together to analyze the real meaning that the author expressed.And this leads us to pay close attention to the translator's knowledge structure and cognitive level,which is consistent with the focus of cognitive context.Therefore,it can be seen that the cognitive context is of practical significance for the translation of the spy novel.Besides the paper adds parameters to cognitive context,which means to parameterize the context factors in order to make the context become more descriptive and manipulable.The contextual parameters will restrict and reflect each other and form mutual restrictive relationships.And by making use of the relationships,we can narrow down the meaning scope thus obtain the exact meaning.The function of cognitive contextual parameters will be activated when the translator starts his or her translation,and it will dynamically influence the translator's understanding of the text.Hereby,the paper divides the problems that causes meaning vagueness into five types and then takes translation examples from the spy novel to illustrate how cognitive contextual parameters can help eliminate semantic ambiguity,discriminate novel metaphors,fill up meaning lacuna,infer meaning and distinguish polysemy.