As a pioneer of the new discipline of linguistics in the UK, Firth's insight into the nature of language not only led him to predict an increased need for translation, it also made him an early advocate of the study of meaning in linguistics. At a time when American structuralist linguists were attempting to exclude meaning from linguistic analysis along with all psychological, or as Bloomfield called it 'mentalistic references', Firth clearly realised the importance of the task of incorporating linguistic meaning into the science of language. And as his definition of meaning as 'function in context' suggests, he was well aware of the importance of running text of the kind that computers are now able to process. In looking at words in their context, he was not, however, the first linguist to understand that - in isolation - separate lexical items are less likely to reveal to us their actual meaning.

Context provides an important link with earlier developments in foreign-language teaching, which in some ways foreshadowed what could be termed the 'communicative turn' in language teaching in Western Europe in the latter part of the 20th century. Over half a century before Firth, Henry Sweet, a member of the Reform Movement, an ardent opponent of the exclusive concern with Latin and Greek among linguists and an advocate of the study of English as spoken, pointed out that detached sentences should not be substituted for connected texts as is often the case in the use of teaching methods that focus on grammar rather than on the text itself: 'it is only in connected texts that that the language itself can be given with each word in a natural and adequate context' (Sweet, 1899/1964: 163).

Awareness of the importance of not viewing words and constructions in isolation is also found in the work of Otto Jespersen, another member of the Reform Movement. In AModern English Grammar on Historical Principles, Jespersen sets out to demonstrate the facts of English usage during different, historical periods. Supporting his discussion throughout are examples culled from the English canon and other sources. As his corpus, Jespersen used the texts in English available to him. His painstaking extraction of illustrative examples, in an endeavour 'to place grammatical phenomena in a true light' (Jespersen, 1961: VI), was at the time a gargantuan task, now routinely achieved in machine-readable corpus studies through, for instance, automatic grammatical 'tagging' of words.

While the importance of spoken language was vindicated by the establishment of the first Department of Phonetics at University College London in 1912 under the headship of Daniel Jones, who had studied under Henry Sweet, the notion of context was further developed by another London University scholar, the social anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. Following his first field study to record the life and work of the Trobriand islanders of New Guinea in the South-west Pacific between 1915 and 1918, Malinowski clearly saw the need for linguistics in developing a school of social anthropology in London, in particular in relation to the establishment of reliable ethnographic texts. For Malinowski, the notion of translation into English was crucial in his anthropological studies and was extended to include the definition of a term by ethnographic analysis, that is, by placing it within its context of situation and its context of culture, 'putting it within the set of kindred and cognate expressions, by contrasting it with its opposites, by grammatical analysis and above all by a number of well chosen examples [ ... ]the only correct way of defining the linguistic and cultural character of a word' (1935, II,16, discussed in Firth, 1968b: 151).

Malinowski's method, according to Firth, included a number of different stages of translation. First, he discusses what he refers to as an interlinear word-for-word translation, sometimes described as a 'literal' or 'verbal translation', 'each expression and formative affix being rendered by its English equivalent' (Firth, 1968b: 149). As a second step this was followed by a free translation in what Firth describes as 'running English'. Thirdly, the interlinear and free translations were collated, leading to the fourth stage, namely, the compilation of a detailed commentary, or 'the contextual specification of meaning', in which the free translation was related to the verbal translation including a discussion of 'equivalents' (Firth, 1968b: 149). The notion of 'context' that Firth embraces is that of Malinowski's 'context of situation' in its widest sense: 'It is clear that one cannot deal with any form of language and its use without assuming institutions and customs' (Firth, 1968b: 156). Also anticipating the ambivalence often expressed by 21st-century translators towards dictionaries, Firth (1968b: 156) expresses his reservations about the traditional use of dictionaries, citing Malinowski: 'I should agree that "the figment of a dictionary is as dangerous theoretically as it is useful practically" and, further, that the form in which most dictionaries are cast, whether unilingual or bilingual, is approaching obsolescence [ .. . ]’. In the current age of the fast-moving knowledge society, contextual solutions to terminological and phraseo-logical problems are crucial to today’s translators, who frequently turn to on-line documentation or even customised electronic corpora as an alternative to traditional dictionaries as well as electronic term bases or term banks, which rarely fully contextualise meaning and use.