ArticleTranslation Theories and Skills http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/tfll.2026.02.013
A Study on Contextual Reconstruction Strategies in the English Translation of Classical Chinese Texts
Juan Peng1, Mengdi Shao2,*
1Jingzhou Development Zone Senior High School, Jingzhou 434000, Hubei, China.
2School of Foreign Languages, Wuhan Institute of Technology, Wuhan 430205, Hubei, China.
*Corresponding author: Mengdi Shao
Published: February 28, 2026
Abstract
Context is required for the expression and understanding of language. Due to history, culture, society and communication, the English translation of traditional Chinese classics often faces the problem of losing contextual information while needing to reconstruct it. Gu Hongming’s English translation of “The Analects” will be taken as the research object in this paper to explore strategies for contextual reconstruction in three dimensions: cultural context, situational context, and linguistic context (co-text). The results offer some references for the study of translation from classical Chinese into English at home and abroad.
Keyword
English translation of classical Chinese texts; cultural context; situational context; textual context; contextual reconstruction
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Copyright
© 2026 by the author(s).
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) license, which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not modified or adapted.
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How to cite this paper
A Study on Contextual Reconstruction Strategies in the English Translation of Classical Chinese Texts
How to cite this paper: Juan Peng, Mengdi Shao. (2026). A Study on Contextual Reconstruction Strategies in the English Translation of Classical Chinese Texts. Translation and Foreign Language Learning, 2(2), 259-265.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/tfll.2026.02.013