A Schematic Approach To Cultural Element Translation

This thesis conducts an analysis of the English version of Mo Yan’s Jiuguo. The Chinese version of the book is a masterpiece with a variety of Chinese cultural elements. Its English version, The Republic of Wine, has not been studied before within the circle of translation studies. Special attention is paid to the translation of cultural elements in the novel from the perspective of cultural schema, a concept proposed by Chinese scholars in their research into the schema theory and translation. Schema refers to the knowledge structure of culture and the kind of knowledge organizing mode that have already existed in the human mind through previous experience. Guy Cook’s schema operation mode is adopted to study the categories of schema changing. Based on the schema operation mode which proposes three kinds of schema changing:scheme reinforcing, schema preserving and schema refreshing, this thesis stresses more importance on schema preserving and refreshing in Chinese-English cultural interaction. Besides, Roger Bell’s information processing mode is also referred to. The top-down, bottom-up and interactive information processing mode is adopted to carry out further study on the operating mechanism of cultural schemata in people’s mind, so as to provide a more scientific understanding of man’s cognition when different cultures encounter each other and thus provide more feasible translation strategies for each category of cultural schemata in Jiuguo. Three categories of cultural schemata are proposed:vacant cultural schemata, conflicting cultural schemata and overlapping cultural schemata. Through data collection in Jiuguo and The Republic of Wine, the translation strategies for the three categories of cultural schemata are studied and a conclusion thereof is reached.