A Study Of Decoding And Re-encoding Of Schema In The Translation Of English Advertisements

With the ever-accelerated development of economic globalization andcross-cultural communication, myriads of English advertisements have been floodinginto the Chinese markets and pervading people’s lives. Conditioned by differentlinguistic and social-cultural backgrounds, the Chinese would always acquire differentcomprehension of the English advertisements with their conception of accessibleinformation and cultural connotations, which is leveled by the translation quality ofthe English advertisements.Among the numerous ever-updating translation theories, many have beenapplied to translation studies on English advertisements, including the RelevanceTheory, Theory of Functionalism, Polysystem Theory, Skopos Theory andCross-culture and Communication Theories, etc. However, most were distinctly proneto one single perspective, rather than improving the translation quality essentially.According to Cognitive Psychology, the process of translation is substantially acombination of comprehension and expression, both of which involve dealing withthe preexistent knowledge stored as schemata form in the translators’minds.Therefore, the translation is practically a schema processing process, includingschema decoding of the source language advertisements and schema re-encoding ofthe target language advertisements.Based on Schema Theory, this thesis attempts to explore the translation processof the English advertisements by probing into the schema processing procedures:specifically the two cases of schema decoding process of the English advertisementsincluding correspondent schema decoding and divergent schema decoding, and the schema restructuring of the target language readers as well as the feasible translationstrategies in the schema re-encoding process. Above all, the author aims to facilitatethe employment of the translation strategies in the translation process of the Englishadvertisements in order to enable the target language readers more accessible to theEnglish advertisements and meet their needs for effective advertisements.To attract the Chinese readers and arouse their interest, it is required that thetranslators, as the subject in the translation process, enrich their schemata knowledgein various fields and thoroughly comprehend the connotations in the source languageadvertisements. Meanwhile, the translators are expected to convert the translationstrategies to make the target language expressions more concise, vivid andinteriorized. Finally, the author puts forward some feasible suggestions to hopefullycontribute to upgrading the translation quality of English advertisements.