Primary Study On Cultural Schema And English-Chinese Translation

Being a dynamic process, translation is a communicative activity carried out between two cultures through the medium of language. This communicative process inevitably involves the cognition of three parts: the original writer, the translator and the target reader. Due to different cultural and cognitive environment, translation as a cross-cultural communication, if not dealt well, may result in false exchange of information and may even cause conflicts. This highlights the translator's responsibility as a mediator between two cultures. Schema theory, with its influential role in comprehension, sheds lights on this cross-cultural phenomenon. This thesis, taking a cultural perspective on schema, that is, cultural schema, discusses how different cultural schemata interact and function during the process of translation.Cultural schema is an emerging research interest on translation study in China. However, most of the research takes a general view on the role of cultural schema in translation activity and the notion of cultural schema is still too vague. This thesis, based on Dilt's Logical Levels, makes a thorough discussion as to what cultural schema specifically refers to and how cultural schema influences translation activity.The thesis starts from a brief retrospect on the main approaches in translation study, namely, linguistic approach, functional approach and pragmatic approach. The author gets a conclusion that all these three approaches fail to consider the translator's mental activity, which is essential during the process of translating, since translation in nature is a cognitive activity. The notion of'schema'in cognitive psychology is then introduced, and the perspective of cultural schema is particularly taken to analyze translation as a cognitive process.Through detailed analysis on cultural schema, it is shown that the complicated translation process is in nature a process of transferring schemata with culture-specific features, in which the translator triggers his or her cultural schema in the ST to facilitate comprehension and reconstruct the information in accordance with the cultural schema in the TT to be accessed by the potential readers. Since cultural schemata vary in different cultures, the translator must strive to avoid misunderstandings through employing different translation strategies.