The Translation Of Proper Nouns In Classical Chinese Poetry-from The Perspective Of Cultural Default

The thesis tries to discover the relationship between culture and translation by making areference to a cultural phenomenon—cultural default in the English translation of the proper nouns inclassical Chinese poetry. The purpose is to testify the universal quality of cultural default intranslation, and the ways by which they can be translated properly. Some Chinese scholars havedone some researches in the translation of the cultural default in ancient poems. They have provedthat the cultural default can be found very common in the realm of translation. This thesis willmainly focus on the translation of the proper nouns in classical Chinese poetry.Cultural default is a communication tactic commonly employed by people who are from the samecultural community. It enables the members with the same cultural background to communicate witheach other efficiently and effectively by omitting their shared cultural background information.Nevertheless，it poses tremendous difficulties in translation. In order to facilitate the target textreaders，who share no common cultural background information with the source text writer，toadequately appreciate the original flavor of the source text, realization and compensation of culturaldefaults in the target text seem to be imperative during the translation process. Poetry, classicalChinese poetry in particular, is the most challenging and difficult literary works to be translated. Thecompensation of cultural default in poetry translation subjects more constraint than in the ordinarytext translation due to the special effect and the fixed form of poetry and the spacial limitation.The proper nouns in classical Chinese poetry are relevant with literature, history, culture, custom,nature and so on. Under the guidance of cultural default theory, the translator should deal with theinformation according to the source text writer’s intention and target text readers’ backgroundknowledge to make target text readers recognize the presupposed cultural information and find outthe cultural difference between the words and context. So the translator should have the correctassumption of the target readers’ background knowledge. With regard to the translation of the propernouns, the true intention of the source text writer, especially the communicative intention should beconveyed by the translator. The communication intention should be kept if the information intentionand the communication intention cannot be realized at the same time. The major translation strategiesthat the translators can adopt include transliteration, textual annotation, paraphrase, conversion,substitution and omission, by which the lack to cultural background information of the target textreaders could be filled and the best combination of proper nouns and context could be achieved too.