The Cultural Default And Its Compensation Strategies In The English Version Of The Scholars

Cultural differences cause cultural default during the cross-cultural communication. So the translators need to fill the cultural vacuum between the writer of the original text and the readers of the translated text, that's the translation compensation. Compensation gives priority to the means of target language, supplemented by the other language means which are in accord with the standard of target language, and according to the type of text and aim of translation, repairing and compensating the potential and occurring losses during the process of translation.In The scholars, Wu Jingzi depicts the greed, hypocrisy and ugliness of various types of scholars, exposes the decadence and darkness of the feudal society, and criticizes and satirizes the imperial examination system and the feudal ethical code. With succinct language and excellent characterization, it is a masterpiece of classical satirical literature of China. Among all the English translations of The Scholars, the translation of Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang must be the most complete and top-quality version. They adopted various strategies to compensate the cultural defaults in terms of culture, custom, history, religion and so on.This thesis takes The Scholars as an example; reviewing the cultural defaults and compensation strategies in the English translation by applying the translation compensation theory. Moreover, plentiful examples are enumerated to analyze the compensation strategies adopted in Yang's version, in the hope that this thesis might be helpful to the understanding of translated works and to the guidance of literary translation.