A Practice Report On Cultural Compensation In English Translation Of Terms With Chinese Characteristics In Dalian Folkways (Excerpt) From The Perspective Of Schema Theory

The terms with Chinese characteristic embodies the essence of Chinese culture and gestates the crystallization of the development of Chinese history.It is a language form with profound cultural connotations.Because folkways culture contains a large number of characteristic vocabulary,many scholars at home and abroad have conducted a lot of research and translation practice on the problem of translatability and translation accuracy of folklore vocabulary.This practice report gives an analysis to the application of culture compensation tactics in the English translation of characteristic terms quoted from Dalian Folkways(Excerpt).Being a typical part of cognitive linguistics,schema theory plays a guiding role in the study of translation process.Combining schema theory with translation practice has certain practical value for intercultural communication of folklore culture.Under the guidance of schema theory research,this report studies and analyzes the key and difficult points in the process of English translation of folklore vocabularies.It discusses translatability of characteristic vocabulary and proposes strategies and methods for solving translation problems from semantic comprehending,image reconstruction,associative meaning and metaphor cognition respectively.With regard to the difficulties drawn from the translating practices,such as easy deviation of semantic comprehending,non-correspondence of Chinese and English images,lack of associative meaning and cognitive disparities of metaphor,this report adopts four practical tactics applied in the English translation of characteristic terms,namely semantic paraphrase compensation,image annotation compensation,associative meaning supplement compensation and metaphorical extension compensation.Easy deviation of semantic comprehending is mainly manifested in the deviation of referential meaning and connotation meaning;non-correspondence of Chinese and English images is mainly represented by the lack of correspondence between symbolic images and descriptive images;there is a lack of associative meanings at the level of the social and affective aspects;cognitive disparities of metaphor are mainly manifested in the differences in verbal metaphor,noun metaphors and adjective metaphors.Semanticparaphrase compensation mainly focuses on literal translation paraphrase compensation and free translation paraphrase compensation;image annotation compensation is concerned about literal translation annotation compensation and transliteration annotation compensation;the primary concern of associative meaning supplement compensation are structural supplement compensation and descriptive supplement compensation;metaphorical extension compensation addresses connotation extension compensation and rhetorical extension compensation.Under the view of schema theory,the case analysis shows that the cultural compensation strategy has certain effectiveness on the English translation of Chinese-character vocabularies and obviously promotes the quality of translation text.It is expected that this practice report will provide some enlightenment and reference value for English translation of Chinese characteristic vocabularies.