A Study On Business English Translation Teaching Based On Cultural Schema

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 study, schema are divided into three different groups:language schema,linguistic schema and content schema.Cultural schema is a sub-category of content schema.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 cultural schema,makes a thorough discussion as to what cultural schema specifically refers to and how cultural schema influences business English translation teaching.During the course of business English translation teaching,there are many mistranslation and Chinglish in the students' work for they lack the relevant business culture. The thesis analyzes the causes leading to mistranslation and Chinglish and the ways to avoid them.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 source text to facilitate comprehension and reconstruct the information in accordance with the cultural schema in the target text to be accessed by the potential readers.The body of this thesis consists of three parts,besides 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 first reviews the research works on schema theory done prior to the present thesis.Three major schemata are discussed in this part,including formal schema,content schema and linguistic schema and also the characteristics of schema and the application of cultural schema in translation.The second part of the body introduces business English and its translation,as well as the different criteria of business English translation.The next part analyzes in detail how cultural schema influences business English translation teaching.The author uses many examples to analyze how to activate the students' original cultural schema and how to instruct them to create new cultural schema.Conclusion part points out that translation activity involves an unconscious process of schemata transmission actually. Besides,it summarizes the limitations of this study,and puts forward some suggestions for further study.