On Compensation Of Cultural Default In Translation

Cultural default is a communication tactic commonly employed by people who are usually from the same cultural community.It enables cultural members to communicate efficiently and effectively by omitting their shared background cultural information in their conversations.Nevertheless,it also poses tremendous difficulties in translation. In order to facilitate the target text readers,who share no common cultural background with the source text author,to adequately appreciate the original flavor of the source text,compensation of cultural defaults in the target text seems imperative during the translation process.Poetry,classical Chinese poetry in particular,is the most challenging and difficult literary works to be translated.The compensation of cultural default in poetry translation subjects more constrains than in the ordinary text translation due to the special effect and the fixed form of poetry and the spacial limitation.According to schema theory,new information is meaningful and comprehendible only when it can be related to the existing background knowledge.When new information is put into readers' schema system,their cognitive mechanism will search automatically for the mapping schema to fill its slots so as to activate that schema.The translator can compensate the cultural default information by providing adequate and accurate cultural background information in the target text to help the target text readers successfully activate their corresponding cultural schema.When the cultural schema of the default word is successfully conveyed to the target text readers,the background knowledge of this word will be transferred and made known to them ultimately.In this thesis,the author will investigate several aspects and levels of cultural compensation,and suggest the proper ways to compensate the cultural defaults in translation of transitional Chinese poetry by taking advantage of the working mechanism of cultural schema.It has been concluded that the translator should take both the aesthetic value and information value into consideration when compensating the original poem's cultural default in the target poem.It is suggested under the circumstance that the translator is unable to take care of both of them at the same time,compensation of the cultural information should take priority,and aesthetic value should give way to cultural information,for one of the key purposes of translation is cultural exchange and learning.