CONTEXT IN THE TRANSLATION OF PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS

CONTEXT IN THE TRANSLATION OF PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS

3.1 Context

What is the context? Context is a complete passage of written or oral speech (text), the general meaning of which allows you to clarify the meaning of the individual words and sentences included in it. It often happens that it is possible to understand the true meaning of a phrase or even a sentence only when considering a meaningful passage of speech or text. Otherwise, the phrase can be understood in a completely different way. Eg: "Over the past week, Nikolai has been eating a lot of apricots every day. As a result, he started looking at apricots with disgust." The phrase – "Nikolai looks at apricots with disgust", may suggest that Nikolai does not like apricots. However, if you read this phrase in context, you can understand that he began to look at apricots with disgust because he ate too many of them. It is worth noting that the context may not always be text or words. It can be presented in the form of any circumstances. For example, you approach a fish seller at the market and ask him the question: "How much?". Of course, the seller will understand that you are interested in the price of fish. However, if you had approached him somewhere on the street and asked the same question, he probably would not have understood you. That is, your question would look out of the context of the circumstances. Context is a necessary condition for communication. The linguistic and extralinguistic context itself differ, i.e. the situation of communication, including the conditions of communication, the subject range, the time and place of communication, the communicants themselves, their relationship to each other, etc. So, the meaning of the statement "Is the window open?" it can be interpreted as a request to close or open a window depending on the temperature in the room and on the street, on street noise, i.e. on the conditions of communication. The linguistic or verbal context itself is opposed to the nonverbal context, i.e. facial expressions, gestures, body movements. The nonverbal context always accompanies the verbal one, and sometimes replaces it. The nonverbal context can reveal the meaning of language units. For example, pointing gestures reveal the meaning of deictic (see Deixis) elements of the utterance. The context can be explicit, i.e. explicitly expressed by both verbal and nonverbal means, and implicit, i.e. not explicitly expressed. Implicit context is one of the types of presupposition: either it is the background knowledge of communicants about the previous situation, or knowledge of previous texts. So, the statement "It got colder in the evening" contains an implicit left context — "It was warm in the afternoon". The statement "Peter saw in his son an obstacle to the present and future destroyer of his creation" (Pushkin) presupposes knowledge of previous texts on the history of Russia.