The Application Of Schema Theory To The Advertisement Translation

Schema theory is used by psychologists to illustrate the psychological process. With the development of cognitive linguistics, as the product of combination of psychology and linguistics, schema has drawn more and more attention from people. The schema theory claims that the new knowledge is to be possessed only through connecting with the exited one. Hence, an effective reading comprehension comes from the full activation and correct decoding of a reader's schemata. So far, this theory has been extensively applied in China to the reading and listening comprehension in foreign language teaching. This paper tried to apply the"schemata"to the translation of advertisement.As a branch of translation, advertising translation possess common characteristics of it, therefore, the author firstly analyzes the translating process from the schema perspective, in hope of provide some theoretical guidance for ad translation in a broad sense. Through literature review, author elaborates the definition, classification, features of schema as well as two models of schema activation, based on which a schema analysis in the translating process has been conducted. It is known that translating process consists of two essential stages: comprehension and expression. From the perspective of schema theory, comprehension refers to decode the schemata of source text; expression means to re-encode the schemata in target language. Translation, in nature, is a cross-cultural communication, which involves three bodies, i.e. the source text author, translator, and the target text reader. Through the schema analysis in this activity, it is found that translator is the subject in the translating process, whose schemata greatly influence the quality of a translated version. Therefore, a translator should continuously enrich his schema, so that he could fully decode the source text and appropriately re-encode the target text.Apart from above, the persuasive function and purpose make the advertising translation distinct from other kinds of literature translation. Due to this, when completing a translation activity, the translator should necessarily take the schematic relationship between target text readers and source text into full consideration to choose appropriate strategies. Through analysis, two kinds of relationship have been concluded,i.e. Schema correspondence and schema divergence, the latter includes schema conflict and schema vacancy, according to which, four feasible strategies are concluded: schema transplantation, schema transplantation & filling-up, schema adaptation, schema compensation and schema abridgement.