A Report On The Chinese-English Translation Of Fire-taking Child (Chapter47-52) From The Perspective Of Schema Theory

In this translation task,the translator chooses six chapters from the work Fire-taking Child as the source text.These six chapters are poems of the Hani people,which have been passed down orally,and contain legends about the migration of the Hani people’s ancestors,the four seasons of production,and the birth and rearing of children.The six chapters of poetry are deep in thought,exciting in plot and vivid in language,showing not only the bravery,hardworking and kindness of the Hani people,but also their rich culture created in life.As a crystallization of the wisdom of the Hani people and an important part of minority poetry,the Hani poetry is of great research and translation value.At the same time,translating the Hani poetry as well as contributing to its spreading is also an important means to convey the charm of Chinese culture abroad.The aim of this translation task is to explore the significance of schema theory in guiding the translation of minority poetry through the research of the Hani poetry,and to enrich the study of English translation of minority poetry,especially the oral folk literature.As minority poetry,the Hani poetry has unique ethnic cultural characteristics and linguistic features.Due to the characteristics of oral narration and transcription,the language expression of the poetry is loose,and some of the language expressions are difficult to be verified.For these reasons,the translator has chosen the schema theory as the guiding theory for this translation.The translator explored this translation task from three aspects: content schema,formal schema,and language schema.For the content schema,the translator analyzes the text from both the geocultural schema and the socio-cultural schema contained in the content schema.Then,the linguistic schema is analyzed from the grammatical and lexical perspectives,and the formal schema is discussed mainly from the aspect of translation of rhetoric.Under the guidance of the schema theory,the translator adopts transliteration,free translation,and annotation methods to improve the quality of the translation,and hopefully to provide a little bit of reference for the future research on English translation of minority poetry.