Cultural Vacancy And Its Management In Translation From The Perspective Of Cultural Schemata

Cultural vacancy is the ultimate reflection of heterology of language and culture. In translation, how to deal with cultural vacancy so as to reconstruct a coherent text is always a big challenge to the translator. In recent years, many published papers have probed into this area, but they usually have focused on case study not theory. This paper researches into cultural vacancy and its translation from a new perspective of cultural schemata.The paper falls into five chapters. The following is an outline of what is presented in each of the chapters.Chapter one is introduction. It introduces the relationship among language, culture and translation, and then, it discusses the main idea of this thesis.Chapter two introduces"schemata theory", especially"cultural schemata theory". It probes into the idea of cultural schema, clarifying its notion, traits, essence and classification.Chapter three expounds the concept of culture and cultural vacancy, the origin of cultural vacancy and the types of cultural vacancy factors.Chapter four proves translatability of cultural vacancy from the perspective of cultural schemata. By analyzing the relationship between cultural vacancy and cultural schemata, it points out that the cause leading to cultural vacancy is lacking a corresponding cultural schema on the target language reader's mind. If this kind of corresponding cultural schema in source language can be transformed into the target language, it will set down a solid basis for the translatability of cultural vacancy. Because humans have some common cultural environment, the same thinking competence and similar reactive competence, cultural schemata in different languages can be conveyed. In this condition, cultural vacancy, as a linguistic and cultural fact, can also be translated because of language and social universalities. However, we must confess that the translatability is relative, and there exists inevitable cultural loss.Chapter five demonstrates the role of cultural schemata in the process of dealing with cultural vacancy in translation, and then, it points out the criterion for the translation of cultural vacancy is whether the corresponding cultural schema is fully transformed. On the...