A Study Of English And Chinese Translation From The Perspective Of Cultural Schemata

Translation is a kind of language activity in which we can represent the content of one language in another one. Being a dynamic process, translation is a communicative activity carried out between two cultures through the medium of language. Language and culture are related closely: language is the carrier of culture and culture is the very soil by which language can exist and develop. So translation is a special cross-language and cross-society cultural activity.Schema is the background knowledge stored in minds. The schema theory fully explains how people carry out information process by making use of prior background knowledge to achieve the goal of understanding. And it can provide a theoretical basis for English and Chinese translation studies. Cultural schema is the background knowledge about cultures. That is an emerging research interest in translation study in China. Based on the close relationship of culture and translation this thesis generalizes the cultural phenomena to the level of cultural schema theory, makes a thorough discussion of concept, classification, etc. of cultural schema and probes into the influential role of cultural schema in translation and some translation strategies, aiming to provide some theoretical and practical basis for promoting the cross-cultural communication.Through the study of cultural schematic view on translation, it is shown that the translation process is not simple sum of decoding and encoding but a complicated process of transferring cultural schemata, in which the translator activates his or her cultural schema in the SL text to facilitate comprehension. And then he or she reconstructs the information of original text in the translated one to make it useful to activate the cultural schema of TL text in readers' mind. So the translator should try his or her best to store enough cultural background knowledge in his or her mind and activate cultural schema when doing translation, and then the translation will become easy, more precise and more comprehensive.This thesis also discusses the application of cultural schema on translation teaching. In translation teaching process, it is important for the students to accumulate the cultural background knowledge and construct the cultural schema in order to improve the students' translation capacity effectively.