Cultural Default And Compensation In The English Version Of The Scholars

The Scholars, one of the classic masterpieces in Chinese literature, is a novel ofthe Qing Dynasty, which was written by Wu Ching-Tzu. With its outstandingideological and artistic achievement, The Scholars has been widely welcomed athome and abroad. Current translation versions include English, French, German,Russian, Japanese and so on.In this thesis, the author, guided by the Relevance Theory, made a detaileddiscussion of its cultural defaults and its translation compensation strategies byanalyzing the translation practice of The Scholars by the famous Chinese ScholarYang Hsien-Yi and his wife Gladys Yang. We have found that the four concepts ofthe theory are helpful in guiding us to analyze the cultural defaults and thecompensation strategies used in the translation of The Scholars.Then we classified the cultural defaults found in the Yang’s version into fivecategories according to Eugen Nida, that is, Ecological Cultural Defaults, MaterialCultural Defaults, Social Cultural Defaults, Religious Cultural Default and LinguisticCultural Defaults. And we compared the defaults in the translated version and foundthat some kinds of compensation have been adopted. After further researches, wefound that the motivation used in the compensation could be fully interpreted from theperspective of the Relevance Theory, e.g. Annotation Compensation for ProcessingEffort, Transformation Compensation for Optimal Relevance, AdvantageCompensation for Contextual Effect, Omission Compensation forOstensive-Inferential Communication, etc.Based on the findings above, we drew a solid conclusion that with the guidanceof the Relevance Theory, we can make useful analysis of the cultural defaults and thecompensation strategies in translating the Chinese literary works so as to find outsome helpful translation strategies.