A Study On English Translation Of Liao Zhai Zhi Yi From The Perspective Of Default Value Schemata

The notion of schema was first put forward by Kant (1781). It refers to the scene andassociation when people read and hear some information. In1926, Piaget started to employthis notion in his research of children’s cognitive development. But the modern schema theoryusually traces back to psychologist Bartlett. He described the notion of schema as “an activeorganization of past reactions and past experiences”.(Bartlett,1932:201) In1970s, Rumelhart(1977), an expert in artificial intelligence field, further developed and perfected this theory.According to the schema theory,“each schema is made up of various parts called ‘variables’or ‘slots’. When a reader gets a message, he is said to have encountered a certain stimulus,then the ‘slots’ of his relevant schema would be filled and that schema would be ‘instantiated’,thus forming a corresponding understanding of the message”(Howard,1987:31-32). In otherwords, these ‘variables’ or ‘slots’ are called default value schemata hidden behind thelanguage symbols.Translation is not only the symbols of the two texts equal in form and in number. It isalso the same with the English translation of Chinese classics. Therefore, it is necessary forthe translators to manifest these default value schemata hidden behind the language symbolsin the source language to achieve satisfactory effects in translation. Liao Zhai Zhi Yi is knownas the representative of Chinese classics; it has a characteristic of concise. There also existlots of polysemy, ancient and modern homonym, interchangeable words and word-classconversion words. In addition, it covers religious terms, literary allusions, myths and legends,ancient officials and chronological terms, imperial examination terms. It shows a higherfrequency of default value schemata owing to the linguistic and cultural differences betweenEnglish and Chinese. The former studies mainly focus on cultural default values, while thisthesis will roughly divide these default value schemata into four kinds: grammatical, semantic,modal and cultural default schemata from the linguistic and cultural level. This thesis tries todiscuss and summarize the strategies in the English translation of default value schemataillustrated with the Strange Tales from Make-do Studio translated by Mair. It also attempts to suggest the filling principles of default value schemata with the purpose of throwing somelight on the English translation of default value schemata in Chinese classics.