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Realization of functional equivalence in translation, it is of extreme significance for a translator to be aware of the importance of context of culture when translating. Failure to correctly understand the context of culture in the original text and to convey it by an acceptable cultural expression in the target language would at many times invite bewilderedness and misunderstanding in the receptors.
Context of culture can be pided into the following 5 types: context of culture concerning times background; context of culture concerning entrenched conventions; context of culture concerning value preference; context of culture concerning unique objects; and context of culture concerning some clever expression embedding cultural factors.
3.1 Times background
Any work is write to the contemporary readers at the author’s time and thus inevitably printed with the backgrounds of that time. While when the work is translated into another language years or centuries later, there must be suspicious persities presented before the translator on the backgrounds both of time and cultures.来!自~751论-文|网www.751com.cn
Take the word “abolitionist” for example. Published in a newspaper in 1963, there was such an expression as “congressman Sherman—the oldest abolitionist in the House of Commons”. What does “abolitionist” mean here? If translated into “废止zhuyi者”, it is obviously too general at large and cannot convey the specific meaning here. Proper explanation of this word require the translator to have a thorough command of the political background at that time when the whole House of Commons was in a heated debate on whether should the death penalty be abolished. In this case, it will be very clear that “abolitionist” here refers to a person who is for abolition on death penalty.
If the same word appears in texts concerning the matters in 20s~30s of the 20th century in America, it means another thing. At that time the United States issued a new law on abolition on alcohol-prohibition. While in texts describing the relevant situations in the 1960s of America, the word “abolitionist” means one who is against slavery, for times then the biggest social problem is the civil war on slavery.
At different times, the same expression can mean different things even within the shared language, so it calls for the translators’ profound knowledge of the times background and analysis of the context of culture in a deep-going way.
Only by command of the current background could the true and specific meaning be understood without twisting (Claire, 1999:132).