A Study On The C-E Advertisement Translation From The Schema Theory Perspective

In modern society,the advertisement plays a crucial role in commercial propaganda. Since China joined WTO,more and more Chinese products have been exported to English-speaking countries.How to translate Chinese advertisements into English to make English speaking people easy to understand and more attractive? How to translate Chinese advertisements into English to set up a good image in cross-national and cross-cultural business? These are very important problems for us to solve.In order to win more foreign consumers,it has become an urgent and important task to translate Chinese advertisements into English.Therefore,there are a great many of scholars who have studied advertisement translation from various perspectives.Most advertisements translations have been dealt with Systematic-functional theory,Relevance theory,Skopos theory, Information theory,Semiotics,Cross-culture and Communication theories,etc.However, the study of advertisement translation from the perspective of cognitive psychology is comparatively rare."Schema,as an integrated chunk of knowledge stored in long-term memory that allows us to form expectations and make the world a reasonable predictable place,is of great importance to comprehension and communication."(Bartllet,1932) The dissertation tries to use schema theory to explore the process of the English translation of Chinese advertisement,and analyzes how to reproduce the style and meanings of Chinese advertisement through the functions of schema on source language(SL)decoding and target language(TL) re-encoding.This dissertation introduces the definition,development, classifications of the schemata,analyzes the significance of schema in comprehension and communication,and explores the feasibility of the application of schema theory to the C-E advertisement translation.Then,this dissertation compares three types of schemata embodied in both Chinese and English advertisements.Chinese and English-speaking people possess distinct language,formal and content schemata and schema transformation is inevitable due to cultural and individual differences in the translating process,which involves decoding of schemata in SL text and re-encoding of schemata in TL text.By probing into the different phenomena caused by schema difference and schema transformation,the author proposes some effective measures to activate relevant schemata in the translator and the TL reader so that the translated text could have similar effect in the receptor as the source text do in the SL reader.There are various data collection channels of Chinese advertisements.Most of Chinese advertisements in the present dissertation are chosen from widely known daily life advertisements.Some advertisements and comments are extracted from academic journals and papers;some are elected from the Internet,which will be illustrated in the dissertation.The dissertation adopts a comparative study between Chinese advertisements and English advertisements,with emphasis on how to translate Chinese advertisements into English versions.The last reaches a conclusion that schema theory does shed new light on C-E advertisement translation and the study of translation psychological process.Therefore, translator's schemata about advertisement translation need more efforts made on it.