On The Building And Conveyance Of Cultural Schemata In Translation With Taipei People As An Example

This paper, with Taipei People translated by Pai Hsien-yung and Patia Yasin as an example, intends to analyze the three situations, i.e. schema equivalence, schema default and schema conflict during the process of building and conveyance of cultural schemata and explore their respective translation methods.The concept of schema stems from philosophy, and is then introduced to psychology, foreign language education, translation studies etc. In terms of the theory, the author reviews previous studies and briefly analyzes translators'mentality in different stages, which lays foundations for the estimation of the reactions of source language (SL) readers and target language (TL) readers in the next chapter.Taipei People, written by Pai Hsien-yung, a diasporic author well-versed in both Chinese and Western cultures, is regarded as one of the milestone works in the history of modern Chinese literature. In this paper, the author analyzes the schemata Pai would like to activate, and discusses the effectiveness of translation after dividing the schemata into three groups-schema equivalence, schema default and schema conflict.The conclusion is rather clear. The translators flexibly adopts a comprehensive translation method to build and convey the cultural schemata in the book:purely converting the texts from Chinese into English when it comes to schema equivalence; replacing the original schemata with equivalent ones familiar to TL readers in the face of the schema mismatch; creating new schemata that are supplemented with notes for schema default; modifying TL readers'schemata by notes or simply deleting the schemata when they are totally contradictory. In addition, the author also proposes some advice to polish the translation of the book, hoping that this paper cannot only promote the application of schema theory to translation studies, but also optimize the translation of Taipei People at the same time.