Cultural Default And Translation Compensation From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

This thesis attempts to expound the phenomenon of cultural default from the perspective of relevance theory and to explore some strategies to compensate cultural default in translation in accordance with the optimal relevance. Since writing and translation are both regarded as communication, sentence meaning and utterance meaning are not differentiated here.Translation in this thesis is not considered as a static process, but rather as a dynamic one. In the relevance-theoretic framework, 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. 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. Relevance theory, with cognition and communication as its core, sheds light on this phenomenon as it is manifested in translation.This thesis consists of six parts. Chapter one is the introduction. In the introduction, a brief survey is given of the latest developments in translation studies, namely, the influence of cognitive theory and relevance theory as well as the cultural turn in this field. Since cultural default is by nature a cognitive and psychological matter in communication and relevance theory is a cognition-focused theory of communication; the author points out that relevance theory should have interpretative power for cultural default and its compensation in translation.Chapter two begins with the definition of default. It indicates the mechanism and communication value of cultural default. Different from ellipsis, the slot left by cultural default can not be filled by information from preceding utterances, but rather the cultural assumption schemas stored in the long-term memory.Chapter Three presents translation problems posed by cultural default. Problems posed by cultural default are not rare in our translation practices. They fall into three groups: undertranslation, overtranslation and mistranslation.