The Application Of Schema Theory In English-Chinese Translation

Schema, as a psychological term, originally indicates the organized background knowledge in the mind which leads us to understand and predict the events in the world around us. Schema theory has been widely applied to the study of foreign language teaching, especially in reading comprehension, by linguists and foreign language teachers. In this thesis, the author attempts to discuss the function of the activation and construction of schemas in the translation process. And furthermore, schema theory was applied to the translation of different types of schemas.In this study, schemas are divided into three different groups: language schema, content schema and culture schema. According to this classification, the translation of different schemas is discussed with the contrastive analysis of specific examples. The results of the analysis proved that the construction and activation of schemas will influence the translation process including both the comprehension process and the expression process. Therefore, in the cases that the related schemas were constructed and activated, the translators performed better in both the decoding of the source language text (comprehension) and the encoding of the target language text (expresion) while in those cases that the related schemas were not constructed or activated, the translators found it difficult in both processes.