A Relevance Theoretic Account Of Cultural Default And Translation Compensation

Relevance theory was initially put forward by French scholar Dan Sperber andEnglsih Scholar Deirdre Wilson in the1980s. It is an important theory on humancommunicative actions from the cognitive perspective. In1991, Ernst August Guttapplied it into translation studies, and pioneered the study of relevance translation.According to relevance translation theory, translation involves dural processes ofostension-inference, it is a secondary communication in which the translator shall tryto seek optimal relevance which can yield adequate contextural effect withoutrendering the target language readers into unnecessary processing effort.Due to differences in geography, material, social culture, religion and language,Cultural default is an unavoidable phenomenon in every cultural and linguistic group,thus it inevitably poses a hard challenge for translators who are supposed to properlycommunicate the distinctive cultural phenomena to another cultural group. Sinceallusions are related to historical events, legends and fables, customs and literaryworks, it is an important aspect for the research of cultural default and translationcompensation.The purposes of the present study are as follows:1. Employ relevance theory to describe cultural default and translationcompensation, and discover translation compensation strategies under theenlightenment of relevance theory.2. Research the methods of allusion translation of The Peony Pavilion translatedby Cyril Birch, Wang Rongpei (汪榕培) and Zhang Guangqian (张光前) from therelevance-theoretic point of view.In order to achieve these goals, this thesis will select allusions of The PeonyPavilion as data, adopt Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory and Gutt’s relevancetranslation theory, especially the concepts such as “the degree of relevance”,“contextual effect”, and “the principle of optimal relevance” to guide the analysis ofcultural default and translation compensation, and conduct a comparative study toseek for proper allusion translation strategies.