A Cognitive Schema Approach Towards Text Construction In Translation Of Editorials

The researches of Schema Theory started in the 1930s in the western and became full-fledged during the 1980s. In the 1980s, Schema Theory was introduced into China and then applied in researches in philosophy, psychology and cognitive science, etc. Although there are many researches in the study of applying schema theory to translation, few researches are conducted to explore about news translation. This thesis tries to discuss applying cognitive schemata into the translation of editorials from three perspectives:the matched cognitive schemata, the conflicting cognitive schemata and the vacant cognitive schemata. This thesis also tries to look into further opinions on researches of Schema Theory.This thesis is based on the author’s own translation of the articles selected from the Economist (UK). The ten selected articles were published between September and November in 2012 about different aspects of the society in the UK. The articles and its Chinese translations are used as the research materials for this thesis.This thesis includes five chapters. The first chapter introduces the background and purposes of this study, the literature reviews at home and abroad and the basic research methods. The second chapter presents Schema Theory, which lays a theoretical basis for this thesis. The third chapter gives a brief introduction to the text analysis of the ten articles, the translation process, and the preparation before translation. The fourth chapter analyses the cases of my translation. It reveals that the Schema Theory is applied to the translation from three perspectives:translation text construction in the case of matched cognitive schemata between source text and target text, translation text construction in the case of conflicting cognitive schemata between source text and target text and translation text construction in the case of vacant cognitive schemata between source text and target text. The last chapter concludes this thesis with the review of this thesis and provides suggestions for further researches.This paper states that we can apply Schema Theory to translation. Readers can construct the translation text from their cognitive schemata, which may reduce readers’ reading-barriers caused by cultural and ideological differences.