Cultural Default And Translation Compensation

Nowadays the study of translation compensation has been drawing more and more attention and a lot of scholars have been making valuable research in this field. Cultural default refers to the absence of some relevant cultural background knowledge and cultural information shared by the writer and his or her intended readers. Cultural default is of great value to literary work for it can improve communicative effectiveness and add aesthetic pleasure to the text. However, since people from different cultural communities have different cultural background and cultural expectations, cultural default causes difficulties to the target text readers'reading. It is essential therefore for the translator to do necessary translation compensation for cultural default. Based on the study of the two Chinese versions of Gone with the Wind, this paper focuses on a major aspect of translation study—cultural default and its translation compensation. The whole paper consists of six parts.Chapter one gives an overview of the whole paper and introduces contents of each chapter of this paper.Chapter two reviews the study of translation compensation both in and outside China. This chapter gives a brief introduction to some research work in translation compensation area done by a number of scholars. Relevance theory is also briefly discussed and the author believes that relevance theory has the interpretative power in translation compensation for cultural default.Chapter three first gives an overall view of cultural default, defining the cultural default, identifying its value and then specifying the necessity for compensating cultural default. Moreover, this chapter discusses matters concerning translation compensation, including its definition and principles. Attention is also given to overtranslation and undertranslation in this chapter.Chapter four mainly deals with compensation methods used in the two versions. With examples taken from the original, this chapter compares methods used by the translators of the two versions. Through the comparison the author states that with the improvement of people's education, literal translation can be adopted extensively.Chapter five deals with some problems related to translators who are involved in translating texts with cultural default. To properly handle cultural default is quite challenging for the translator: he should has the ability to recognize and correctly understand the cultural default as a reader, and the ability to accurately assume his reader's cultural background as a writer. Thus, a translator must be perfectly bilingual and bicultural and must hold a serious attitude towards translating.In conclusion, with the increasingly cultural exchange, more and more cultural default will be accepted and better appreciated by readers of target language. Therefore, literal translation as a compensation strategy will be greatly used by translators in dealing with cultural default.