A Report On The Translation Of An Excerpt From Tea And Health

The translation report is written in accordance with the C-E translation practice of the first four chapters of Tea and Health by Zhang Maolin,a national senior tea appraiser in China.The translation material contains a wealth of knowledge about Chinese tea culture,including the origin of tea,the edible and medical values of tea,tea property,and the production process of tea.Difficulties present themselves in the translation of these culture-loaded words and distinctive Chinese sentences.Therefore,how to tackle them is the main focus of this report.The Cultural Schema Theory is adopted as the guiding theory of the translation practice.The Cultural Schema Theory believes that cultural schema is a knowledge structure embedded in human’s brain,which consists of the accumulated and updated past experience and knowledge relating to culture,and enables people to perceive and understand various cultural phenomena.Based on the three situations of cultural schema,i.e.,cultural schema correspondence,cultural schema conflict and cultural schema default,the report intends to figure out appropriate strategies to achieve a faithful and accurate delivery of the cultural information contained in the source text.Under the guidance of the Cultural Schema Theory,the conclusion can be summarized as follows:when it comes to cultural schema correspondence,literal translation and naturalization are practical to stimulate the target reader’s related cultural schema.Under the circumstance of cultural schema conflict,transliteration plus annotation and conversion are viable strategies to correct the deviated cultural schema.In terms of cultural schema default,transliteration plus annotation,intratextual gloss,extratextual gloss and conversion are effective at the lexical level,and omission,amplification as well as reconstruction are feasible at the syntactic level to compensate for the vacant cultural schema.