A CORPUS-BASED STUDY ON TRANSLATING RELIGIOUS CULTURE-SPECIFIC ITEMS (RCSIS) FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF CULTURAL SCHEMA THEORY

Abstract

The challenges presented by religious culture-specific items (RCSIs) are well documented. How to render them with proper translation strategies is less investigated. In particular, previous researches neglected a target-oriented approach to translation problems of RCSIs. In this article, we propose the theoretical application of cultural schema theory to religious translation that is cognitively able to adapt translated text into the target culture through prototype-matching, template-matching, bottom-up and top-down strategies. Based on this, we explore the translation procedures of RCSIs in the self-built Chinese-English religious terms corpus, and carry out a schema-based classification of RCSIs. With a descriptive, comparative and quantitative analysis method, this paper discovers nine translation procedures employed to render RCSIs; and three types of RCSIs: religious schema overlapping items (RSOIs), religious schema vacant items (RSVIs) and religious schema divergent items (RSDIs). For translating procedures of each category, RCVIs are rendered with nine procedures while RSOIs with five procedures and RSDIs only with three procedures. It is hoped that a cultural schematic view of RCSIs provides inspiration not only for furthering research on CSIs but also for opening up cognitive perspective on translation studies.