The Translation Of Biblical Images In The Pilgrim's Progress--An Analysis Of Three Chinese Translations From The Perspectives Of Schema Theory And Skopostheorie

The Pilgrim's Progress, a renowned world classic, has been put on the list of contemporary literature retranslation by different Chinese publishing houses. By making a comparison of the translation of biblical images in these new versions, the writer of this thesis finds a variety in thestrategies and methods used by different Chinese translators. To explore the reasons hidden behind, the writer tries to resort to two famous theories, the Skopostheorie and the Schankian schema theory with Cook's addition to it. According to Skopostheorie, the primal principle that determines the whole translation process is the Skopos(purpose) of the overall translational action. On the other hand, the Schankian schema theory with Cook's addition points out that text understanding is in fact the result of the interaction between the readers' existing schemata and the text, yielding certain effects on readers' schemata. A combination of the two theories leads to the implication that the dominating rule in the translation process is in truth the desired effect upon the intended readers' schemata. This argument is applied to the study of the translation of some biblical images in three contemporary Chinese translations of The Pilgrim's Progress by different translators. Adequacy, a new criterion, proposed in the Skopostheorie is also used to evaluate the different strategies and methods employed in rendering the same biblical image. Thus the thesis is devised to arouse people's awareness of the influences of different intended schematic effects upon translators' decisions made in respect to the translation of images.