A Schema-theoretic Perspective On The Translation Of Obama's Inaugural Address

Schema theory is an important achievement of psychological studies of memory. It points out that people must correlate the new information they receive with their schemata so as to evoke understanding of the important information. In recent decades, schema theory has gained a rapid growth in the linguistic research field, providing researchers a brand-new perspective to study linguistic matters. Since its birth, schema theory has been applied widely to the reading teaching field. The application of schema theory into translation field, especially the translation of inaugural address is quite few.In this thesis, the author tries to use schema theory to analyze the Chinese translation of Obama's Inaugural Address, to further demonstrate the feasibility of applying schema theory into translation, and provide some suggestions as for how to improve translation quality from the perspective of schema theory.Schema theory will be applied in the whole process of translation, including source text interpretation and target text production. Meanwhile, the analysis of Chinese translation of Obama's Inaugural Address will be made from three types of schema, that is, content, formal and linguistics schema respectively. On the basis of the whole analysis, the author tries to demonstrate the importance of adopting schema theory to the translation practice. At the same time, the author proposes how to improve translator's ability as well as translation quality by means of schema theory including expanding schema, more practice and more comparison.