Cultural Default And Its Compensation In Translation From The Perspective Of Aesthetics Of Reception

In view of the inextricable connection between language and culture, translation is inevitably an inter-cultural activity, rather than a simple process of inter-lingual transference. As a commonly seen phenomenon in literary text, cultural default is defined as the absence of relevant cultural background knowledge shared by the writer and his intended readers. Since the writer and his intended readers have shared cultural background knowledge in written communication, the default of transparent or self-evident cultural information can create great aesthetic value and achieve economy of expressions, thus improving communication efficiency. However, in intercultural communication activities such as translation, the SL writer and the TL readers do not share the same cultural background knowledge due to their living in different language-culture communities. As a result, cultural default of the original texts poses a big challenge to the translator. Translators have summed up some effective methods of compensation for the TL readers' cultural default in their translation practice. This paper attempts to introduce aesthetics of reception into the process of translating, in the hope of finding a new perspective for compensation study of cultural default, puts forward the principles of compensation and discusses the advantage and disadvantage of current approaches the translators adopted in dealing with cultural default, providing a reference for the translators to choose a suitable way to deliver default cultural factors.First of all, the author of the thesis states the necessity of the research by revealing the close relationship among language, culture and translation and making a review of the cultural default study in Chinese translation field. The paper then does an overall analysis of cultural default from the aspects of its definition, origin, aesthetic value and communication value and puts forward the necessity of compensation for cultural default. Next, the author gives a systematic introduction to aesthetics of reception, including its main thoughts, influence and significance. Through a detailed analysis of some important concepts of reception aesthetics in translation, and their enlightenment on compensation for cultural default, the paper makes a full research on the principles, and methods of compensation and brings about the conclusion that according to aesthetics of reception, in the process of cultural compensation, the translator...