A Study Of Tourism Translation From The Perspective Of Schema Theory

Based on empirical analysis and some typical examples of tourism translation,this thesis makes a research on different aspects of tourism translation from theperspective of schema theory. It tries to be objective and comprehensive withconsideration of the cognitive psychologies of overseas tourists.Tourist attractions include not only gorgeous natural landscape, but also peculiarcultural heritage. The main purpose of tourism translation is to transmit theinformation to overseas tourists, so that they may have a better understanding of thetourist attractions and arouse their desire of visiting.Schema is the systematic organization of knowledge and experience which existin people’s minds, and it also works as the foundation of helping people to aware newconcepts and understand new things. Translation is in a sense the conversion betweentwo different language schemata as translation involves two important stages:understanding and expressing. The key to understanding the original text is decodingsource language correctly, while to expressing is encoding the similar contentproperly with the target language.According to schema theory, the more schemata exist in translators’ minds, themore easily they can understand the original text. Translators are able to transmit thesimilar information with target language only by activating relevant schematareasonably. During the process of translation, translators can only decode the sourcelanguage correctly after they find a proper solution to the three complex situations:correspondence, difference and default. Meanwhile, translators should also dealappropriately with lingual schemata, contextual schemata, stylistic schemata andcultural schemata in the tourist text. Only after these two procedures can translatorsproduce an excellent translated text. With the guidance of schema theory, the thesis classifies the methods of tourismtranslation into: amplification, omission, selection, regulation and adaptation, hopingthe study results can contribute to improving the quality of tourism translation.