"It depends on the context"

If there were an award for the most repeated phrase in the world of translation, it would definitely go to the sentence "it depends on the context." No translator is free from the guilt of uttering these cliché words to their fellow conversationalists who turn to them for linguistic guidance. Be warned: whenever you ask a translator about the meaning of a term, the answer you get will remain unaltered unless you provide them with contextual information. The classic course of the conversation would be along the lines of: 

Asker: "What does 'knock' mean?" Translator: "It depends on the context."   Asker: "Do you know the meaning of 'set'?" Translator: "It can mean to establish or decide or to fix something, depending on the context."

 The importance of context

No matter how repetitive these words appear to be, they still constitute the most truthful answer a translator can give you. The interpretation of some words, such as "knock" and "set," is highly context-dependent. If they were to answer: "'Knock' means to collide with something," the definition would not be suitable in the phrase "don't knock him for being slow." The correct definition would have been "to criticize harshly or unfairly." Contextual integration is therefore essential to achieve a reliable definition. In fact, most English words are highly ambiguous and sometimes semantically unrelated (e.g., watch: a time piece, to look; rose: a flower, past tense of rise). The meaning is therefore deducted from the linguistic context or the situational context. Words in a phrase are not present in isolation; their interaction with other words in their environment is what truly governs their meaning. In order to achieve an effective translation, the translator must be able to decontextualize the source text and recontextualize it in the form of a target text. Machine translation and free language services on the internet are still defective because they still have trouble identifying context. This is the differentiating factor between human translation and machine translation and a clear illustration of the importance of context.