A Relevance-Theoretic Approach To Cultural Default And Its Reconstruction In Translating Li Bai’s Poems

This thesis chooses the translations of Li Bai’s eight poems as the study object, which have already been collected in the book called A Comparative Study on English Translations of Old Gems by Lv Shuxiang, and also collects translations from Xuan Yuanchong, Yang Xianyi and Gladys, Ding Zuxing and Burton Raffel, Waley, Sun Dayu etc. From the perspective of compensation strategies and cultural default, this thesis classifies and analyzes the cultural default phenomena embedded in different translations of Li Bai’s poems from five categories of culture proposed by Nida and Newmark, namely, ecological culture, material culture, social culture, religious culture and linguistic culture. We propose the mode of cultural default translation based on Relevance Theory. Meanwhile, according to the contextual principle of Relevance Theory, we make a detailed comparison of different compensation strategies used by the translators, that is, annotation, amplification, substitution, generalization and omission. Through the detailed analysis and comparison, we find that an excellent translator should possess the sound insight of cultural default elements and the ability of constructing cultural default phenomena, and make sure that the target readers can get the optimal relevance from the culture construction.