Cultural Default And Its Compensation Strategies In Wang Rongpei's English Translation Of The Book Of Poetry

Culture is a tricky word and it's closely related to translation. Now, more and more scholars have taken translation as a process that involves definitely not only linguistic transfer but also shifts of socio-cultural factors. Cultural default is defined as absence of relevant cultural background knowledge shared by the author and his/her intended readers. The contents of cultural default usually can not be found within a text, but they are related to the cultural background beyond a text. Owing to differences in people's cognitive environment of different cultures, cultural default will lead to serious failure in inter-cultural communication. Cultural default in poetry is a very common literary phenomenon. For translators, the greatest difficulty lies in the compensation of cultural default to convey poems'aesthetic features and artistic infection.The Book of Poetry is one of the earliest collections of poems in the world. With a wide coverage of topics, The Book of Poetry can be said to be a long scroll of painting or an encyclopedia of the society, which profoundly reflects all aspects of the social life from the early stage of the Western Zhou Dynasty to the middle of the Spring and Autumn Period. From 18th century many scholars have translated The Book of Poetry into English. The various editions of The Book of Poetry have made great contributions to the distribution of ancient Chinese poetry in the West, but they have not embodied the essence of these poems and the latest research due to the early publishing dates and the translators'limitations in understanding Chinese culture.This thesis takes Professor Wang Rongpei's translation of The Book of Poetry as an example, reviewing the cultural defaults and compensation strategies in the English translation by applying the translation compensation theories. Moreover, plentiful examples are enumerated to analyze the compensation strategies adopted in Wang's translation, in the hope that this thesis might be helpful to the understanding of translated works and to the guidance of literary translation.