Context Reconstruction In English Translation Of Chinese Classics From The Perspective Of Schema Theory

Annals of the Kingdoms in the East Zhou Dynasty was written in ancient vernacular Chinese by Feng Menglong,a Chinese historical novelist in the late Ming Dynasty.It describes the over 500-year Chinese history which starts from the Chinese kingdom beginning to break apart into smaller states and ends with the first unification of the land accomplished by the First Emperor of Qin.The translation of classical work is not only of great significance in the spread of traditional Chinese culture and wisdom but also highly valued in the study of Chinese early-stage historical records.Featuring by concise and comprehensive language,extensive culture and intertextuality,Chinese Classics are the typical works of literature with high context which contain much hidden information.Therefore,the English translation of Chinese classics sometimes requires context reconstruction,thereby realizing the maximum sharing of context between writers of original works and the reader of the translation and bridging the differences of cognitive environment and structure.Originated from psychology,the concept of schema refers to the representation of knowledge in human’s brain.The schema theory,as a branch of cognitive linguistics,can be applied into and well explained the process of translation.This paper tries to associate the schema transformation with context reconstruction and explores how to construct the context in English translation of Annals of the Kingdoms in the East Zhou Dynasty from the perspective of schema theory.It studies context reconstruction from the linguistic context,situational context and cultural context under the interactive relations between the schema and the text,respectively are schema correspondence,schema conflict and schema default and provides some translation strategies.The study concludes that linguistic context requires the translator to use the strategy of assimilation,which gives expressions with similar or same linguistic schema in English.For situational context,the translator needs to enrich the pragmatic meaning of words,sentences or discourse and compensate the lacking information due to schema conflict or default.For cultural context,the strategy of accommodation is adopted.By revising the schema even establishing the new schema,the reconstruction is achieved.In this case,translation methods such as liberal translation,liberal translation with explanation,transliteration with annotation and liberal translation with annotation can be employed.This paper for the first time uses the schema theory to study the context reconstruction of Chinese classics.It is expected to make contributions to the translation strategy of Chinese classics of the same kind in the future and give those translators and scholars enlightenment in the relative research field.