Maybe we should stop using advanced and somewhat hand-wavy vocabulary like "context" for that. The thing is that the prompt has to be long enough.
The word "potatoes" in context of a specific 500-page book has little ambiguity. Same word but extracted out of the same book and fed to a translator(human or machine) in isolation would be much more ambiguous. You probably don't need the whole book, but the solution space do reduce as you give translators more out of the content or how it's used in the original as well as in other parts of translations.
It's similar to how GPS works. With one satellite, your location is precise as "on Earth, I guess". It gets more precise as you add more satellites that further and further reduce margins of errors.
The word "potatoes" in context of a specific 500-page book has little ambiguity. Same word but extracted out of the same book and fed to a translator(human or machine) in isolation would be much more ambiguous. You probably don't need the whole book, but the solution space do reduce as you give translators more out of the content or how it's used in the original as well as in other parts of translations.
It's similar to how GPS works. With one satellite, your location is precise as "on Earth, I guess". It gets more precise as you add more satellites that further and further reduce margins of errors.