Cultural Default And Translation Compensation

The activity of translating is not merely the transformation of languages, butalso the communication of different cultures. The phenomenon of cultural default isvery common in the process of verbal communication, particularly in literary works.The existence of cultural default in literary works contributes to the stimulation ofthe readers’ imagination, and the enhancement of the communicative efficiencybetween the source text author and the intended reader, thus increasing the aestheticvalue of literary works. The problem of cultural default, however, becomes one ofthe obstacles to cross-cultural communication owing to the disparity of the sourcelanguage culture and the target language culture and the discrepancy of the culturalbackground knowledge between the source text author and the target readers. Thetranslator, therefore, is supposed to be fully aware of the issue of cultural default, andought to have an accurate interpretation of the cultural default in the source text, andadopt appropriate and effective compensation strategies so as to help the targetreaders accurately comprehend the source language culture and to ensure the culturalfunction of translation.In light of cultural default and translation compensation, at first, the paperclassifies and analyzes the cultural default elements embedded in Shen Congwen’sshort story Zhang Fu from the three categories of culture, including social culture,material culture and ideational culture, and then, the paper conducts a comparativeanalysis of the compensation strategies adopted in the version of GladysYang(1919-1999)’s, a renowned British translator and a communicator ofSino-Foreign cultural exchange and that of Jeffrey C. Kinkley(1948-), an Americansinologist and a history professor at St. John’s University from different perspectives,such as annotation, contextual amplification, adaptation and generalization. Throughdetailed examples, the paper finds out that: translator’s accurate insight into thecultural default elements implicitly embedded in the source text and the adoption of corresponding effective compensation strategies are the key to the target readers’ fullcomprehension of the source text, appreciation of the aesthetic value of the sourcetext and enjoyment of exploring the source language culture; during the process oftranslating, translator should judge the relationship between the source languageculture and the target language culture and abide by pertinent principles of translationcompensation for cultural default so as to employ appropriate compensationstrategies.