ABSTRACT
The process of translation may start even earlier than the reading of the text, in the building of general knowledge, language skills and lateral thinking. The fi rst stage of any theoretical or pedagogical discussion is to look at what we read and what prior knowledge we bring to reading. The notion of schema, fi rst coined and developed by Bartlett (1932), is based on memory, ‘literally reduplicative and reproductive’, which ‘every time we make it has its own characteristics’ (Bartlett 1932: 204). All the formal and informal learning we have done, factual, abstract and emotional, every memory, good or bad, vague or detailed, including the physical sensations that go with human activity, combine to bring understanding to our reading.
