Research On Zero Translation Strategy For Cultural Default

In the process of communication, as both the writer and his intended readershave the same certain cultural identity or cultural background, there’s no reason thatthe writer won’t omit the messages what he believes needless to mention. This iscalled cultural default. But in cross-lingual and cross-cultural communication, culturaldefault could result in the vacuum of sense for foreign readers. So translators areresponsible to compensate for the default messages by a proper way of translation andhelp foreign receptors fully understand the source text. Zero translation is mainly todeal with untranslatability caused by cultural differences. And now, the maintranslation methods of cultural default are those traditional ways. This thesis firstlyproposes the concept that zero translation could be applied to the translation ofcultural default and it aims to provide a new perspective for the study of culturaldefault.According to schema theory, foreign readers may fail to get the implicitmessages of a source text owing to the default of a certain schema. And the translationof cultural default is to help them construct a schema in order to compensate relevantcultural background knowledge. Zero translation is the transference of the linguisticand diagrammatic characters or transliteration of the source language. Translators leadtarget language readers to enter the source culture and to understand the source item.So zero translation represents the source culture itself and could compensate for thesource culture. The author proposes that for the first time to translate cultural default, it is recommended to use zero translation with other translation methods together,such as zero translation with liberal translation or zero translation with annotation.Liberal translation or annotation could help target language readers understand thesource culture exactly and construct a relevant schema. Whereas zero translationcould not only compensate the default slot on the form level, but also help the targetlanguage readers compensate for the same cultural default presented again in the sametext and activate the pre-formed schema by the cue of zero translation item.Moment in Peking reveals an integration of a kind of language and another differentculture and an integration of two identities between writer and translator. This is a sortof self-translation without a source text, which is implicit in the writer’s mind. Basedon its Chinese version, the thesis tries to restore the source text and discusses Lin’szero translation strategy for cultural default. Then the study gets a conclusion thatzero translation could be successfully applied to the translation of cultural default.