Frame Theory And English-Chinese Translation

As we are at the stage of communication in history of translation research, parties involved in the communication and the media in which the communication is achieved are two key elements to study. Therefore, the cognition approach should be adopted besides the knowledge approach i.e. to identify what a competent translator needs to know. The second approach can be further divided into process-oriented and linguistic, culture-oriented studies. As the linguistic study has been matured to some extent, what has been left is to explore translation process and translator's mind when translating across cultures.The thesis starts with three major approaches to translation studies: linguistic approach, functional approach and pragmatic approach respectively. The author gets a conclusion that they are all lacking in exploration to translator's mental activities after discussing the advantages of the above three approaches. Then the notion of'frame'in cognitive psychology is introduced to analyze the cognitive process with the illumination of its definition, types, features, and the relationship between'frame'and culture.We have found, after the analysis, that the complicated translation process is not a simple amalgamation of decoding and encoding. The message sender's intention, the target receiver's expectation and the translator's interpretation of the two sides should be taken into consideration. What impels the translator to match the intention and the expectation subconsciously is transfer mechanism within his mind, which is actually the culture-bound-frames.According to cognitive linguistics, linguistic expressions function both as triggers to activate and as anchors to stabilize the cognitive frames on which meaning in language relies heavily for its generation. Therefore, the task of translation is to find in the target language the linguistic expressions which help to activate the cognitive frames identical or similar to those in the source language. Since different languages are networks of different frame systems, subframes, and cultural frames, the translator must strive to avoid a conflict among frames components and to reestablish the harmony in the target language.By recognizing the status of frame in translation process, we can raise the activities at subconscious level to conscious level and thus help the translator to make decision during...