Cultural Default And Translation Compensation In Texts

With the development of text-linguistics, the study of translation changes gradually fromthe perspective of static words and phrases to the perspective of dynamic text. In the processof translation, a dynamic inter-cultural communication, the translator should take all theparticipants into consideration ranging from the original writer, the function of text, text typeto the target reader. What a text covers is composed of three parts: the information the linguistic contextcontains, the information the situational context contains and the information the culturalcontext contains. When translating a text, the translator can always transmit the entireinformation in the first two parts. However, cultural difference is a rather complicatedproblem. It is the existence of cultural difference that embodies the multiplicity of culture aswell as an obstacle to translation. The information in the cultural context of the original isalways difficult to activate the schema in the TL reader's mind, hence the emergence ofcultural default. This paper deals with the cultural context of the text in detail and argues thatthe process of text translation is that of translation compensation for cultural default. Beginning with the concepts of culture and cultural default, this paper proceeds to thecommunicative value of and the necessity of compensation for such a complex languagephenomenon, cultural default. Then the author applies Peter Newmark's categorization of text,that is, all texts fall into three categories in terms of the function of text: the expressivefunction, the informative function and the vocative function. In the process of text translation,as the inter-cultural communication, the theory of equivalent effect is employed so as toproduce eventually the same function of the target text as that of the original through thevarious compensation methods for cultural default in different type of text. The expressive text is author-centered and subjective. It is the writer who uses theutterance to express his feeling or describe an event irrespective of any response of the readers.In the opinion of the author of this paper, the characteristic expressive text-type is literature.Literary work contains rich deposits of native culture and is the major medium fortransmitting native cultural heritage to foreign language readers. The translator should bear inmind the responsibility for introducing native cultural heritage to foreign land. Therefore, thestyle and cultural background knowledge in the original should be kept in the target text andthe cultural default should be well compensated in translation. The core of the informative text is information-centered such as EST. For the purposesof analysis, the author of this paper takes scientific and technological text as the exampletext-type to study the methods for translation compensation for cultural default. Incomparison with the other two, in the informative text, the original writer uses little weirdcultural knowledge like figures of speech or allusion to express some subjective idea butfocuses on the objective fact. Therefore, the cultural default needing compensating of theinformative is smaller than that of the other two categories in the target text. The vocative text is readership-centered, aiming at calling upon the readership to act,think or feel, in fact to react in the way intended by the text, for example, advertisement. Inthe translation, the translator should use the language to evoke the readers' emotion. Thecompensation of cultural default is dependent on cultural differences and the methods forcompensation are decided according to the response of the readers. Through analysis, this paper intends to put forward the various principles for thetranslation compensation for cultural defaults in each category of text and offers thecorresponding strategies to deal with them on the basis of these principles. Firstly, translating the expressive text...