- •1. Speak-on the lexical meanings, connotations, associations and grammatical meaning. (pp. 9,10)
- •Ambiguity of translation equivalents, (p. 11)
- •3. Translation as a specific coding-encoding process, (pp. 16-18, p. 21)
- •4.Translation as a specific type of bilingual communication (pp. 21-23)
- •5. The ambiguity of a language (p. 23)
- •6. Context, situation and background information and their role in clarifying a message.
- •7. Translation as an object of linguistic study in terms of process and outcome, (p.31)
- •8. Verification process and its role in translation (pp. 32-34)
- •9. Transformational approach to translation (p.40-41)
- •10. Denotative approach to translation (pp. 42-43)
- •11. Communicative approach to translation (pp. 44-45)
- •12. Meaning, equivalence and extra linguistic information as three basic components of translation.
- •13. Types of translation, (p. 53)
- •14. Translation equivalence (pp.58-59)
- •15. Types of translation equivalents, (pp. 60-63)
- •16. The importance of semantic and pragmatic similarity, (pp.60-64)
- •17. Style as an essential component of adequate translation, (pp.68-72)
- •I8. Transformation as a change of the source text at the syntactic level during translation (pp.78-82)
- •19. Types of transformation in translation, (pp. 78-82)
- •20. Basic translation devices (portioning, integration, transposition, replacement, addition, omission, antonymic translation) (Lecture 10)
- •Integration
- •21. Basic factors that influence the choice of translation equivalents, I.E. Context, situation, background imormation. (Lecture 11)
- •22. Role of cultural background in equivalent selection. (Lecture 11)
- •23. Difficulties of translation connected with the languages peculiarities of the grammatical and lexico-semantic systems. (Lecture 14)
- •24. Difficulties of translation of Infinitive and Gerund Complexes
- •25. Text compression and text development during translation. (Lecture 15)
- •27. Translation of Official Documents. (Lecture 18)
- •28. Written translation and interpretation. (Lecture 15)
21. Basic factors that influence the choice of translation equivalents, I.E. Context, situation, background imormation. (Lecture 11)
From the previous lectures and your own translation experience you know that the choice of translation equivalents depends on the context, situation and background information. This lecture presents more detailed information on the role these and some other important factors play in the process of translation equivalent selection.
Thus, the main factors are context, situation and background information. They are well-known, but, regrettably, their definitions by various scholars substantially differ.
To start with, let us define the context.
For the purpose of practical translation we shall call the context the length of speech (text) necessary to specify the meaning and translation of a given word.
Also for the purpose of practical translation we shall distinguish between immediate and general context.
Immediate context is a sequence of syntactically and semantically related words that determines the meaning and syntactic function of a given word and forms the basis for its translation.
Note the words 'forms the basis' in the above definition - these words are critical indeed, because immediate context is seldom sufficient for the proper choice of equivalents. Usually immediate context is limited to a sentence, though in many cases a length of text shorter than a sentence is sufficient as an immediate context.
However, to get all information necessary for translation one should take into account the general context as well.
General context is the source text as a whole.
The choice of translation equivalents depends both on immediate and general context.
Any source text, however, consists of words and word combinations which you are to translate to finally end up in a target text. And to say the least, words and word combinations are very different as to the problems they present for translation.
Compare, for example, words and word combinations in the left and right columns of the Table below.
organization insider
society power-broker
territory mainstream
development hot button
region________________________marginal__________________
It is easy to note that the entries in the left column present no problem for translation whereas to find proper equivalents for those in the right column one needs at least broad context and desirably also a piece of background information.
The explanation lies in the fact that unlike those in the left column the right column words are relatively new language formations standing for also relatively new phenomena of the American culture. Then the next conclusion may be:
The choice of translation equivalents for individual words and word combinations depends on the translator's awareness in the underlying cultural background.
To select proper equivalents one needs to be aware of the cultural background the source text being translated.