Realization Of Schema Theory In Translation Process

In the 1980s, schema theory was applied to the interpretation of reading comprehension process and then developed into one of the important reading theories, which clearly pointed out that people come to understand new information by activating their relevant schemata in their mind. Furthermore, based on the reading theories, psycholinguistics have applied schema theory into the research on foreign language teaching and explain the psycholinguistic process in foreign language study and reading, and believe that schema is of importance in reading comprehension, both in the first language and second language context.With the advent and development of modern cognitive psychology, the concept of schema has been enriched, making it possible applied to the arena of EFL research. Up till now, many researchers have applied schema theory to listening comprehension, cloze test, blank, etc. However the application of schema on translation is quite little. In this thesis, schema theory has been applied to translating process which aims to make EFL translation efficient.Moreover, not as the research of translation theory, I focus on translating process not the outcome. As we know, in research of translation theory, focus has always been more put on the"outcome"of translation and the standardization of the"outcome,"while the"process"of translation has more or less neglected. Nevertheless, we still believe that the exploration of translation process is crucial because it is in the process that the quality is created and the target text is created. Although the process of translation is quite complicated, it is undertaken in a transient moment in the mind of the translator and researchers are seldom aware of the subtle and complicated procedure of translation. Another reason why the process of translation is neglected is that some scholars believe that human beings cannot manipulate the whole process of translation.As is known, translation is a complex process in which decoding the source text and re-encoding the text in target language are involved. Since there exists some related points, the author of this paper would like to study the process of translation from the angle of schema theory. In the present study, the author attempts to investigate the roles of various schemata in translating, and suggest some effective ways of how to activate the schemata in translating process.The body of the thesis consists of three parts, plus an introduction and a conclusion. Introduction part gives a brief explanation on the contents and motivation of the present study. In the first part of the body, the author gives a detailed introduction of schema theory, including the definitions, functions classifications of schemata and etc. The second part of the body makes a discussion about translation. By translating, the author means what is to be studied is the process not the outcome. Since it is crucial and complex which decoding the source text and en-coding the target text are involved. In the next part which is the main part, the author applies the schema theory to the translation process. In this part, the content schemata and linguistic schemata in the translating are discussed in detail. Conclusion part points out that the findings of the thesis. Besides, it summarizes the limitations of this study, and puts forward some suggestions for further study.