Cognitive Context In Translating

Context plays a vital part in translation studies. Regarded as communication from the perspective of relevance theory, translation is context-dependent. Theoretically, communication not only requires encoding, transfer and decoding processes, but also involves inference in addition. The reader's inference is based on the combination of context and utterance. In the cognitive sense, context is a set of psychological constructs (such as schema), a subset of the reader's assumptions about the world. Context is not given but chosen. In the process of the reader's inference, the reader chooses those more manifest or accessible contexts. The degree of access or manifestness is determined by relevance. In order to further probe into the nature of cognitive context, it is necessary to introduce another notion "schema". Cognitive context is stored in form of schemata in one's mind. Regarding translation, to probe into the ST (source text) author's cognitive context and the TT (target text) reader's cognitive context and to re-establish the optimal relevance between them, the translator needs to study their schemata. Studies reveal that there are three types of relations between their schemata: (1) corresponding schemata, (2) defaulting schemata, and (3) conflicting schemata. The translator is supposed to adopt different translation strategies according to the different schemata relations. Moreover, schemata can be roughly split into content schemata and linguistic schemata. And cultural schemata as sub-schemata of content schemata play an important role in translation because translation is a cross-cultural communication whose one of the missions is to promote the cultural exchange and amalgamation. The thesis dwells on the analysis of cultural schemata and linguistic schemata, and analyzes the gains and losses of the different translation strategies.