Application Of Cognitive Schema Theory In Brand Name Translation: A Process-orientated Perspective

Cognitive schema, as a psychological term, refers to the mental representation of background knowledge which reflects or reconstructs past events or experiences and helps to comprehend and predict newly occurred events. The schema theory has been widely applied to artificial intelligence and linguistic studies such as reading and listening comprehension, cloze test, foreign. language teaching and so forth. With the development of modern cognitive psychology and linguistic study, schema theory has been increasingly adopted in translation studies.With the fast development of global economy, the translation of brand names is becoming an indispensable element in global economic exchanges. It is a cognitive activity involving the perception of foreign cultures and linguistic features. This thesis attempts to investigate the translation of brand names from the perspective of schematic cognition in combination with translation theory which regards translation as a process.In psychological studies of perception, translation is considered as a cognitive process, transferring meanings from the source language to target language. Translation is a two-fold communication activity, involving communication between the author of the original text and the translator, and that between the translator and the target readers as well. In other words, the translating process is the process of comprehending and expressing. From the perspective of schema, the essence of comprehending is decoding the source language and expressing is encoding of the source language by the target language. Therefore, the translation process from the cognitive perspective, consisting of decoding the source text and re-encoding the target language text, emphasizes the translator's cognition and information processing.In this thesis, British scholar Roger T. Bell's model of the translation process is adopted to study brand name translation, the process of which includes the functioning mechanism of schema, the activation and reconstruction of both structure schema and content schema. The data of brand names are collected from the Internet, business journals and daily advertisements. A comparative study of translation between English and Chinese brand names is adopted in this thesis, leading to a conclusion that the schema theory in translation process provides a theoretical guidance for brand name translation.