Cultural Default And Its Translation Strategies: A Cognitive-Skopos Theoretic Approach

Cultural default is defined as the absence of relevant cultural background knowledge shared by the author and his intended reader. It is the natural result of the cognitive process of communication. Since it is a culture-specific phenomenon and the cognitive environment of the original writer and that of the target reader are different, cultural default often results in misreading or incoherent understanding in cross-cultural communication. This highlights the translator's responsibility as a mediator between cultures. Cognitive psychology and schematic theory, with cognition as their core, sheds some light on this phenomenon.Translation is an act of communication carried out between two cultures through the medium of language, which involves the cognition of three parts: the original writer, the translator, and the target reader. Skopostheorie has four rules: Skopos rule, cultural specificity rule, coherence rule and fidelity rule. Skopostheorie, by focusing on the purpose of translation determining the translation strategies, accordingly, makes up the inadequacy of traditional translation theory and guides our translation strategies of cultural default.This thesis attempts to expound the phenomenon of cultural default from the perspective of cognitive-schematic theory, to combine cultural default with the coherence rule of Skopostheorie, and more importantly, to explore some strategies for dealing with cultural default in translation in accordance with the Skopos rule and the principle of cultural specificity of Skopostheorie.The thesis consists of six parts. The introductory part explains the research background, the research objective, the theoretic framework, and the general organization of the study.Chapter One takes a literature review of studies on translation as a cross-cultural communicative event and studies on cultural default. The author points out that Skopostheorie should have interpretative power for translation strategies of cultural default.Chapter Two provides an overall view of cultural default through cognitive psychology and the schema theory. Cultural default is a common phenomenon in communication, for which both the schema theory and cognitive psychology may give a convincing explanation.Chapter Three presents the coherence rule of Skopostheorie and links it with cultural default. After an analysis of the coherence rule, the author concludes that cultural default, a technique frequently used by the writer, can make the text brief and coherent.Chapter Four discusses translation strategies of cultural default in accordance with the principle of the Skopos rule and the principle of cultural specificity of Skopostheorie. It begins with an account of the problems encountered by the translator and the central part of the translator's task on dealing with cultural default, and goes on to the Scopos-theoretic approach to translation. Possible contextual effects the translation produces are discussed and some possible translation strategies of cultural default are introduced. By illustrating, the author proves that each of the strategies is effective when and only when it accords with the intended purpose of the target text, and the typology and context of the source text.Finally, a conclusion is drawn that since translation is a kind of cross-cultural communication, a careful study of cultural default is essential to successful translation. The author reiterates that the schema theory, cognitive psychology and the coherence rule of Skopostheorie can shed some light on cultural default and, more importantly, the Skopos rule and the principle of cultural specificity can provide some suitable translation strategies to cultural default.