The Application Of Schema Theory To EST Translation

The word"schema"originates from psychology and indicates the organized background knowledge in the mind which leads us to understand and predict the events in the world around us. Since the time in 1781 when the famous psychologist and philosopher Kant for the first time came up with the concept of schema. In the time of Kant, it is only the concept of schema that was proposed but there is no theory developed on the basis of the concept. It is not until the time of Sir Frederic Bartlett that the modern theory of schema was developed. Schema theory systematically deals with the impact of background knowledge on the process of understanding. Schema theory has undergone a long history of development and has been widely applied to the study of foreign language teaching, especially in reading comprehension by linguists and foreign language teachers. This paper tries to apply the schema theory to the study of translation and attempts to discuss the function of the activation and construction of schemas in the translation process, especially in the process of EST (English for Science and Technology) translation.In light of the prior studies, the author deems it essential to classify schemas into four different categories: language schema, context schema, style schema and culture schema. With this classification, the translation of different schemas is probed into by dint of the contrastive analysis of specific examples. The initial findings conclude that the construction and activation of schemas do affect the translation processes either in terms of the"decoding"period (the comprehension process) or the"encoding"period (the appropriate rendering into the target language). Substantial evidence shows that those who apply schemas to their translation practice where necessary outperform those who don't. When decoding the original text, the translators are advised to achieve the maximum homogeneity by enlisting or triggering the relevant schemas. In encoding the target text, the translators are supposed to appeal to the readers'relevant schemas if possible or help create more new schemas for effective and efficient cross-cultural communication.