A Study On Idiom Translation From The Perspective Of Cultural Schemata

Language is not only the carrier and embodiment of culture, but also thesignificant component of it. While idioms, as a special form of language, areconsidered to be the crystallization of peoples’ wisdom and have strong national color.Therefore, it is more challenging to translate idioms which are rich in their culturalconnotation.“Schema”, a concept in cognitive psychology, refers to the backgroundknowledge of past experiences stored in people’s mind. It is believed that we shouldrely on our pre-existing schemata to comprehend new things. For the past few years,schema theory has been widely applied to several areas such as foreign languageteaching and translation; however, the research on idiom translation from theperspective of schema theory is far from enough.In view of this, the thesis tries to adopt cultural schema which is an essentialcomponent of schema theory to analyze idiom translation for the purpose ofimproving the situation of mistranslation on certain levels and providing a relativelynew approach to idiom translation. The research results indicate that cultural schemais of much instructive meaning to idiom translation. It can not only help translatorscorrectly decode and encode idioms, but also enhance the level of translatabilitythrough constantly activating, adjusting and enriching the schemata of translators.