A Report On C-E Translation Of Ethnic Minority Culture Elements In The New Long March Of Happiness (Excerpts) Guided By Schema Theory

“Telling China’s Stories Well” has been an important part of China’s foreign publicity efforts in recent years.56 ethnic minority groups share rich and colorful cultures that have become the shining card for the country’s cultural confidence.The cultures of various minority groups will see a period of great development as China’s the Belt and Road Initiative has been implemented.The publicity of splendid ethnic cultures is essential for foreign cultural exchanges in which ethnic minority cultural translation plays a key role.According to schema theory,the perception of a new object is required to be linked to background knowledge and experience,and the process of understanding and expressing something new needs to rely on the schemata in people’s minds.A correct understanding doesn’t emerge until the new information corresponds to the schemata.Translation is a communication activity between languages and cultures.The process of understanding the meaning of the source text,bilingual conversion,and accurate expression in the target language involves a cognitive shift on language and culture.From the perspective of schema theory,translation is essentially a process of schema shift.The report selects the narrative novel The New Long March of Happiness as a source of translation materials.Against the backdrop of China’s comprehensive victory in the battle against poverty,the novel tells the story of the main character,Lin Meijiao,a povertyalleviation comrade dispatched in a village,and a group of other outstanding community-level comrades who carry forward the “spirit of the Long March” to overcome difficulties,lead the way to villages’ prosperity for a happy life as well as the personal spiritual “poverty alleviation”for Lin.The story reflects the journey of poverty alleviation in the Tibetan-inhabited areas of western Sichuan province,China.The novel consists of twenty-five chapters,rich in content on culture.The report selects chapters 9,11,and 17 as the translation source texts,and regards the most distinctive ethnic minority culture elements as the object of study.Statistically,the corpus contains 148 minority culture elements,divided into 6 categories by names of nature,people and places,religion,custom,food,dwellings,and clothing.The schema theory reveals that the translation of ethnic minority cultural elements is a schema shift process and that the common features and differences between Chinese-English cognition require various translation methods to achieve the cognitive shift of ethnic cultural elements,through the study of the complete correspondence,partial correspondence and schema creation of linguistic and cultural schemata in the translation of material and spiritual-cultural elements above,as well as the process of Chinese-English translation of ethnic minority cultural elements.The report is divided into five parts: report description,translation process,theoretical framework,case analysis,and conclusion.It describes the shifting process involved in the decoding and encoding of schemata in the translation of ethnic minority cultural elements under the guidance of schema theory and discusses and summarizes the translation methods required for this shift,revealing the reasonableness of the theory in exploring the cultural cognitive shift in the translation of ethnic cultural elements and guiding such translation.The report also helps future translations of ethnic minority cultural elements and serves as a complement to the translation and theoretical application of ethnic cultural elements.