A Study Of Chinese Dish Name Translation In A Bite Of China From The Perspective Of Schema Theory

With the more and more frequent communication and exchange between countries, an increasing number of foreigners hope to get a deeper understanding of Chinese broad and profound culture, especially the splendid Chinese cuisine culture. It occupies a crucial position in the Chinese cultural system and enjoys a high reputation all around the globe.A Bite of China is an excellent documentary of Chinese cuisine culture broadcasted by CCTV. It serves as a good media to introduce the brilliant Chinese food culture to foreigners who are interested in it. It not only shows the process of cooking a dish, but also introduces the Chinese culture and stories embedded in the dish. Two seasons of A Bite of China have been broadcasted on CCTV, which include 15 episodes covering the stories of over 300 people and more than 1000 dish names. The Chinese dish names not only reflect various ingredients, cooking methods, colors, aromas, tastes, forms of the dishes, but also contain many cultural elements such as dish inventors, original places, literary images and auspicious wishes. The appropriate English translation of these Chinese dish names plays a very significant role in promoting the transmission of Chinese culture and accelerating communication between China and other countries.Many studies have been made on the translation of Chinese dish names from different perspectives such as cultural perspective, functional perspective, etc. This thesis tries to take the Chinese dish names in A Bite of China as examples to analyze the process of the translation of Chinese dish names from the perspective of Schema Theory, and explores how to reproduce the beauty of Chinese dish names through source language decoding and target language re-encoding.Schemata are knowledge structures pre-existing in memory. They are derived from previous knowledge and experience, including linguistic schemata, formal schemata and content schemata. Schemata are individually idiosyncratic and culturally specific, fixed but flexible with activation, modification or creation. Shared schemata are the basis of communication, while sometimes schemata may also become obstacles to understanding. Schemata play key roles in text processing while in turn texts may bring about the restructuring of new schemata. Schema Theory has significant implications on translation. The common schemata among human beings make translation possible while the discrepancy in linguistic, formal and content schemata brings difficulties to translation.Under the guidance of Schema Theory, the author makes a contrastive study between Chinese and English dish names in three aspects:linguistic schemata, formal schemata and content schemata. In order that the translated version of dish names could have similar effect as the original ones do, the author also puts forward some effective measures to activate the relevant schemata in the translator and the target reader. As to the differences in schemata, the author proposes that different strategies should be exploited to deal with these differences:for the differences in linguistic schemata, translators should make the translated versions accommodate to target language conventions; for the differences in formal schemata, translators should take the strategies of literal translation or free translation plus explanation so as to retain the image of original dish names; and for the differences in content schemata, translators should adopt strategies like schemata activation, modification and creation.