1.2 Purpose for the Research 

  Although the study concerning context is abundant, which is also very complicated and disordered. In order to better reveal the significance of context in translation, this thesis will mainly focus the linguistic context, situational context, and cultural context concluded by Hu Zhuanglin. Moreover, the translation of Pygmalion will be employed to manifest the importance of context in translation. 

1.3 Organization of the Paper

First, the thesis will introduce the background and purpose of the study; second, views on context both at home and abroad will be analyzed and Hu Zhuanglin’s concept will be the key point to the study; third, from the perspective of linguistic context, situational context and cultural context, the thesis will employ the translation of Pygmalion by Yang Xianyi to make a case study; finally, it will reemphasize the important role of context in translation and make a conclusion about the deficiency of translation at present.

Chapter 2 Literature Review

2.1 An Overview of Context

In 1923, Malinowski, the anthropologist, put forward the concept of context, which makes people realize the understanding of a language is not confined only by language itself, but also its users and environments. Without considering these important factors, the language will turn into meaningless. J. R. Firth, the English linguist, carried forward the thought of Saussure and Malinowski. He developed a view of the context-dependent nature of meaning with the notion of ‘context of situation’. Influenced by J. R. Firth, Michael Halliday developed the internationally influential systemic functional linguistic model of language, in which he took a functional approach to regard language as an instrument of social interaction. Sir John Lyons worked on semantics and classified meanings into four categories. Every meaning is differentiated, thus great attention should be paid to the context. From the development of context theory, we can see the western scholars’ definitions of context are descriptive with no concrete conclusions, so further study should be made to analyze the domestic research on context. They attempt to make the concept of context accurate and normative, and focus more on the essence of context, such as its classifications and features. So far, there have been many different point of views about the definitions, classifications and features of context which are caused by the perse research directions of scholars. Some lay particular emphasis on linguistic perspective, some are on rhetorical devices. Moreover, when they classify context, the characteristics, functions and inscapes of context in each linguistic branch are not detailedly considered, which makes the theory of context complicated and disordered. However, Chinese scholars have made some contribution to the study of context and reveal the importance of context in translation.

2.2 Theoretical Basis of Context

2.2.1 J. R. Firth’s Semantic View of Context

Firth regards speech act as a meaningful activity to realize a purpose, thus the analysis of language requires the study of meaning, which is defined as the function of context. Meaning is the key to language research which contains phonetics, grammar, lexicography, textual relations and semantics. Besides, Firth pides context into two categories, one is from language itself and combined by various components; the other goes beyond language which refers to non-linguistic environment. In conclusion, he believes that every word in a new context will turn into a word with different meanings.

Second, Firth advocates that the meaning should be decomposed into a series of modes or levels, such as lexical meaning, pragmatic meaning, phonetic meaning and so on. Each mode or meaning has its own function in a particular context. Such kind of formal meaning comprises of collocation level, syntactical level and phonetic level. In linguistics, collocation is the way that some words occur regularly whenever another word is used. For example, the word “dark” can be matched with “night” as the meaning attached to “night” can be collocated with “dark”. Thus, collocation means an abstract concept in the horizontal level with no direct relation with the study of the word’s meaning in traditional and conceptual way. Moreover, Firth makes a distinction between frequently-used collocations and customized collocations. In syntactical level, the formal meaning also exists. For instance, there are only singulars and plurals in English. However, in Fijian, duals are the word class that cannot be ignored. As a result, the singulars in English have totally different formal meaning with the singulars in Fijian. In phonetic level, different phonetic unit owns distinct formal meaning in the linguistic system.