A Study Of English Translation Of Tang Poetry From The Perspective Of Schema Theory

With the frequent economic and culture exchange all over the world, poetry hasbecome an important medium for achieving communication and increasingunderstanding, and even many nations have been putting it into a part of enriching theircultural life. Tang poetry, as the peak of the development of Chinese classic poetry, hasbeen accepted and spread out widely overseas. As we know, with abundant traditionalcultural conceptions and moralities, Tang poetry is endowed with some features:profound and comprehensive contents, elegant and exquisite form and extremely highartistic achievement. Owing to this, it is a hard work for us to completely comprehendthe essential meaning of a Tang poem. In addition, the difference of language andculture in each region all over the world has been an obstacle for understanding andtranslating Tang poetry. Therefore, to overcome all these problems and find out areasonable solution for translating a Tang poem into English has been an issue thatbrooks no delay.Schema refers to an abstract structure consisting of personal life experience andknowledge, which has existed in people’s brain and is often used to help understand andaccept new things. It was Immanuel Kant (1781) that firstly proposed the concept“schema”, and Frederick Barlett (1932) that put it into use in modern psychologicalstudy. During this period, schema theory, as a crucial theory in cognitive linguistic, hasbeen developing quickly and become more and more mature. In recent years, manyscholars at home begin to apply schema theory to discussing the comprehension ofsome reading materials. At the same time, their attention is paid more and more toconsidering the combination of schema theory and translation theory for the purpose ofguiding and improving translating practice. As for the translation of Tang poetry, mostof studies mainly focus on choosing image schema theory to analyze the conveyance ofartistic conception of certain Tang poem or discussing the use of translating strategieswhen translating them. Few theses can be found to pick out so plentiful differentEnglish versions of Tang poems for a comparative analysis from the perspective ofschema theory. This dissertation applies language schema, formal schema and contentschema from schema theory to discuss different English versions of some Tang poems,and finally draws a conclusion that Tang poetry can be translated and somemistranslations and even errors can be avoided as much as possible by the use of some strategies. This thesis consists of six chapters:The first chapter introduces the research background, purpose and significance ofthis study, research questions and structure of this paper.Chapter two is the literature review mainly summarizing the research status ofTang poetry translation at home and abroad. In addition, poetry translation theory andthe feasibility of poetry translation are introduced.The third chapter is the theoretical framework, and gives a systematic introductionto the schema theory including its origin, definition, classification, characteristic as wellas the processing ways of schema activation. The last part of the chapter, therelationship between schema and translation as well as the application situation ofschema theory in the translation of poetry especially in Tang poetry is introduced.The fourth chapter mainly discusses difficulties in the translation of Tang poetryand meanwhile gives some approaches to help solve these difficulties.The fifth chapter is the main body of this thesis in which the author analyzes theapplication of schema theory in the translation of Tang poetry. The analysis is done fromthe three levels of schema theory including language schema, formal schema andcontent schemata to explain the importance of the schema theory in the course of Tangpoetry translation.Chapter six is a conclusion of this thesis, which introduces the main findings andpoints out the applicability of schema theory in the translation of Tang poetry. Throughcomparative analysis, several conclusions can be listed as follows:1) Schema is an experience and knowledge universally existing in people’s brain.And this thesis proves that schema theory does help analyze the translation of Tangpoetry and improve its translation quality.2) To translate a Tang poem with high quality need the translator to first perform asa reader and make a complete comprehension of the source poem. At the same time, thetranslator’s capability of target language (TL) is critical.3) Owing to the difference of language and culture, some special words in Tangpoetry can not be transformed into English directly. The translator has to find outappropriate strategies to reproduce and even destroy the source language (SL) by theapplication of schema theory so that the translated poem can activate correspondingschemata in the target language reader and finally achieve comprehension.However, this study has its limitations. For example, samples in this thesis are onlya few from the translation of some famous translators like Xu Yuanzhong and ArthurWaley, etc. So the research scope has much room to improvement. The author sincerely hopes that this dissertation can draw more and more insightful scholars’ attention infuture to the translation of Tang poetry from the perspective of modern cognitivelinguistics to improve our translation quality so as to well enhance cultural exchangebetween China and the western world.