"ordinary World" Translation Of Cultural Default And Compensation Strategy

Cultural default is defined as the absence of relevant background knowledge shared by the writer and his oriented readers; it is also a linguistic phenomenon in communication reflected in literary works. According to the Aesthetics theory, the occurrence of cultural default in a text can stimulate the readers’imagination, increase the communicative efficiency between the writer and the readers, and hence strengthen the aesthetic effect of the text. But in translation, cultural default of the original texts often turns out to be a tough nut to crack due to the difference of cultures. Translation is a kind of intercultural Communication activity. It relates to three aspects of cognitive operations concerning with the original author, the translator and target language readers. But during the writing process, the original author might not consider the receptivity of the target language readers. What are transparent to the source language readers always create a vacuum of sense to the target language readers. Therefore, it gives the translator a great challenge. How does the translator solve this problem and help the target language readers to gain similar contextual effect as the source language readers? The present research makes an analysis on the translation of the17-18chapters of The Ordinary World. In the first place, various aspects of the cultural default in the original are analyzed in this paper, and then it is followed by an introduction of the translation strategies with regard to cultural default. Through comparing and analyzing, the author reaches a conclusion: each strategy can successfully transfer the optimal relevance in some cases but may fail in others. In other words, in a translation several strategies will be used to solve the problems of cultural default.