Context in Translation

Understanding and Identifying the Context

What is context?

In a narrow sense

Context - immediate linguistic environment (words, clauses, sentences) in which a word appears.
This is known as linguistic context or co-text which may cover a paragraph, a whole chapter and even the entire book.

In a broad sense

It includes the physical situation which embraces the people, time, place, and even the whole cultural background.

It is called

- extra-linguistic or non-linguistic context

Context

 ~ notion used in the language sciences (linguistics, sociolinguistics,systemic functional linguistics, discourse
analysis, pragmatics, semiotics, etc.) in two different ways, namely as

 verbal context

 social context

Verbal context

 Verbal context refers to surrounding text or talk of an expression (word, sentence, conversational turn,
speech act, etc.).

 Verbal context influences the way we understand the expression.

 the modern study of verbal context takes place in terms of the analysis of discourse structures and their
mutual relationships, for instance the coherent relation of ideas.

Social context

 In sociolinguistics, social contexts were defined in terms of objective social variables, such as those of class,
gender or race.

 More recently, social contexts tend to be defined in terms of the social identity being construed and displayed
in text and talk by language users.

Influence

 The influence of context parameters on language use or discourse is usually studied in terms of language
variation, style or register

 language users adapt the properties of their language use (such as intonation, lexical choice, syntax, and other
aspects of formulation) to the current communicative situation.

What specific aspects of context (environment, setting) are most significant for the purposes of TR?

 One is concerned with those features of context that influence meaning.

  Professional translators do not limit their contextual focus to the text surrounding a word or phrase, i.e to the
linguistic context.

Broad Types of context

 (a) Local Context,

 (b) Sentential Context,

 (c) Topical Context, and

 (d) Global Context

Conceptual layering of contexts of a word in a piece of text

 Local context refers to the immediate circle of the KW; it can provide the most vital information regarding the
contextual meaning of a word.

lexical block LW1 + KW + RW1

*KW – main member

**LW1 & RW2 – supporting members

 Sentential context refers to the next circle immediately beyond the local context. We refer to the sentential
context for retrieving the information from the sentence where the KW has taken place.

 Topical context - focuses on the content of a piece of text. We need to explore the topical context to extract
information from the topic of discussion if the local context and the sentential context fail to provide it.

 For example, in English, based on the variation of topic the word shot refers to ‘firing’, ‘drinking’, ‘hitting a ball
by bat’, ‘kicking a ball’, ‘putting a ball in the net’, ‘distance between a player and the hole’, ‘taking a snap’,
‘giving an injection’, or ‘making love’, etc.
  Global context to acquire information from the extralinguistic world for deciphering the contextual meaning
of the KW when we find that other contexts are not able to provide us necessary inputs for our purpose.

 The meaning of the KW is not only related to the meanings of other words occurring within local context,
sentential context, and topical context, but also to extralinguistic reality surrounding the linguistic acts
undertaken by language users.

 E.g. ‘He is indeed a bookworm, eating books whole day is his work’.

 Thorough explanation…

 Since the KW is used in the sense of “always reading books”, we can understand it only when we are able to
know the literal and metaphoric meanings of bookworm.

 The literal meaning of bookworm is “a larva of a moth or beetle which feeds on the paper and glue used in
books” and metaphoric meaning is “a person devoted to reading”.

 Once we are able to understand that a human being is metaphorically referred to as bookworm, we realize
that the KW is used here not in literal meaning but in metaphoric meaning.

 Thus, understanding the contextual meaning of the KW depends on the general use of language, metaphoric
use of words, and pragmatic knowledge of the users. a

Other Types of context

1. Linguistic context

2. Extra-linguistic context

a. situational context

b. cultural context

Linguistic context

 Linguistic context consists of the linguistic material which precedes and follows a statement.

 Linguistic context is how meaning is understood without relying on intent and assumptions.

 Linguistic context - discourse that precedes a sentence to be interpreted.

Extra-linguistic context

 Situational context — the time, place, participants and their relationship.

 Cultural context — the whole culture background (the social custom shared by people of a certain speech
community, including politics, economy, philosophy, technology, history, etc.)

situational context (pragmatic context)

 The situational context contains the information about the immediate physical material surrounding the
situation.

 situational context is knowledge about the world.

 situational context

 Situational context refers to every non-linguistic factor that affects the meaning of a phrase.
  E.g the phrase "it's cold in here",

 can either be a simple statement of fact

 or a request to turn up the heat, depending on, among other things, whether or not it is believed to be in the
listener's power to affect the temperature.

 In the following sentences:

The kids have eaten already

and

surprisingly, they are hungry,

 The situational context helps to interpret the second sentence because it is common knowledge that
humans are not usually hungry after eating.

In different situations (time, place, etc.), the same utterance may have different meanings.

It comes into play when a message cannot be fully understood without information that lies outside the linguistic
utterance. This is the case of some notices, inscriptions and posters which cannot be understood without an
explanatory commentary.

Example

John is like a fish.

Situation A: It is said when John is swimming.

Interpretation: John swims well.

Situation B: It is said at a party.

Interpretation: John drinks a lot of wine.

Situation C: It is said when people discuss about John’s character.

Interpretation: John is as cold as a fish. (indifferent)

Mary: Can you open the door?

Jack: Yes, I can.

a) If Jack goes to open the door after this, then the word CAN indicates a request.

b) If Jack doesn’t go to open the door after this, then the word CAN indicates a kind of ability. Then Jack’s answer is an
indirect refusal.

The classroom is noisy, the students are in a mess. The teacher comes in,

Teacher: Order!

A student: Beer!

All of the students burst into laughter.

The naughty student misunderstands the teachers’ meaning deliberately.

sociocultural context

 Finally, the sociocultural context is the configuration of the data taken from social and cultural influence on
verbal behaviour and its uses according to different circumstances.

 For example, there are social rules to greet or rules in order to know which linguistic register use in a particular
situation.

 Sociocultural context provides the data necessary for us to communicate.

 Information can be stereotyped structures of situations or concepts which allow us to associate some
meanings with other meanings.

 For example, if someone says “library”, we will automatically think in a context in which there are books,
shelves, librarians, etc.

In different cultures, the same lexical term may not mean the same thing to people of different culture backgrounds.

Bear

In Chinese culture ---- stupidity, clumsiness

In Russian culture ---- friendliness

In Romanian culture ---- unfriendliness, hostility.

Colors

RED

 England: misfortune, cruelty, disaster, passion, violence, etc.

e.g. have red hands, red tape, painted the town red, waving a red flag (to irritate sb.)

 China: Good luck, celebration, summoning

 Russia: Communism

 Eastern: Worn by brides

 Western: Excitement, danger, love, passion, stop, Christmas (with green)

 http://webdesign.about.com/od/color/a/bl_colorculture.htm

Two Perspectives in
categorising various approaches to context

 M. Baker (2006) identifies the major

 issues in how context is approached by discussing three contrasts:

 · Context as an abstract cognitive construct within the mind vs. a concrete set of real-world entities that guide
social interaction

 · Context as static vs. dynamic

 · Context as neutral vs. power-sensitive

  House (2006) reviews the various traditions that have dealt with context:

 · Philosophy

 · Psychology

 · Pragmatics

 · Sociolinguistics/anthropology

 · Functional linguistics

A Third Dimension of Context –

PURPOSE

 Purpose indicates why one is interested in context.

 one could study context in TR either for the purpose of analysing existing TRs or

 for the purpose of improving the production of new TRs.

 Breakdowns of context into components in the Translation Studies literature :

 the ‘context of situation’ consisting of field, tenor (content), and mode (Halliday; Manfredi),

 and the SPEAKING model from Hymes (1996), consisting of setting, participants, ends, act sequence, norms,
and genre.

 Task: Suggest a possible source (a TV weather report, a book review, etc.) for each of the following fragments
of l-ge taken from different contexts.

1. … a cool, dry place. Keep well out of…

2. … magnificent vistas of coastline, beautiful beaches,…

3. … my whole body is caressed by a protective, creamy moisturizer …

4. … an octagon with a central pillar and spacious windows …

5. … bringing scattered thundershowers…