Cultural Schemata In The English Versions Of Lao She's Luo Tuo Xiang Zi

Schema is an organized form of the knowledge of nature and the human society in human brains,which,to people,is the basis of knowing and understanding the world.As a subclass of schemata,cultural schema,which can be regarded as an indirect manifestation of culture,is highly related to culture.In one sense,the exchange of culture can also be treated as the exchange of cultural schema.Therefore the nature of translation is the translation of schemata,as various schemata in the SL are desirably represented in the TL.For as a communicative activity of cross-language and cross-culture,translation is to promote the exchange of cultures by introducing different cultures in order to facilitate the development of culture.Moreover,the discussion of the translation strategies of cultural schemata is conducive to the understanding of languages and cross-cultural communication.This thesis takes on Luo Tuo Xiang Zi,a masterpiece of Lao She,a famous modern Chinese writer,which contains a lot of Beijing spoken language and dialect and many descriptions of local customs and practices,rich in material cultural elements,social cultural elements,religious cultural elements and linguistic cultural elements as displayed in the two English versions,which are analyzed and compared in terms of correspondence,conflict and vacancy of cultural schema,under the guidance of the cultural schema theory and the translation strategies-A-A Correspondence,A-B Correspondence and A-Zero Correspondence.It can be observed that translating is a complicated communicative activity which touches upon at least two linguistic and cultural systems,and original writers of the work,translators and readers of the translated versions are all involved in this complex activity.Better handling of various kinds of cultural elements under the framework of the cultural schema theory can guarantee a more effective and successful translation of the whole work,which runs through three stages: the decoding and understanding of the cultural schema of the original text,the selecting of translation strategies and the re-encoding and expression of the cultural schema in the target language,as is the aim of this thesis on how to translate cultural elements in the light of the cultural schema theory.