Analysis Of The English Versions Of Li Qingzhao's Ci-Poetry Under Schema Theory

The exploration of the translator's psychological process in translation is a new perspective for translation studies, which further promotes the diversity of translation studies and makes them more and more evidence-based. Schema theory, a branch of cognitive psychology, has been applied to reading comprehension and translation studies. Schema is the knowledge and knowledge structure stored in people's mind through continuous learning and accumulation of life experience. When they experience something new or receive new information, the schema stored in their mind will match, change and transform automatically, forming new schemata to help understand information and predict new changes.Li Qingzhao is an outstanding representative in Chinese classical poetry history. Her ci-poetry are widely read at home and abroad and are popular with Chinese and foreign scholars who have done a lot of research on it.The thesis, taking the English versions of Li Qingzhao's ci-poetry for example, attempts to explore the translator's psychological process in translation from the cognitive schema theory, taking into account the nature of literary translation, making readers involved in the translation activity, and to test the matching degree between the schemata of the translator's output in the target language readers' mind and that of the source language in the source language readers' mind through comparative analysis. The thesis collects and summarizes the Chinese readers' understanding and appreciation of the source text Ru Mengling (one of Li Qingzhao's ci-poem); it quotes 6 English versions of Ru Mengling from 6 translators, offering detailed introductions to each translator's psychological schemas towards poetry translation and their understanding about the ci-poem; it inquires 30 foreigners in the form of questionnaire investigation and organizes the information that the foreigners get from the 6 English versions and their understanding and appreciation of them. And thus the author conducts a comparative analysis between the schemata of the translators' output in the target language readers' mind and the schemata of the source language in the source language readers' mind with the nature of literary translation in mind and finally arrives at the best translation naturally.The aim of this study is to demonstrate the tremendous explanation power of schema theory in translation process, and its effectiveness resulting from the readers' participating in translation while taking the nature of translation into account, so as to blaze a new path for translation studies.