The Analysis Of Cultural Defaults Compensation From The Perspective Of Relevance Translation Theory

Writers often omit some cultural background information shared by themselves and their intended readers, and the absence of cultural knowledge is called cultural default, the function of which is to comply with the economic principle of pragmatics and achieve the communicative efficiency. However, people with different cultures are not familiar with the omitted cultural information, which usually leads to incoherent understanding or even misunderstanding. Therefore, it is extremely significant for the translator to faithfully and effectively translate the cultural defaults.In order to better study the strategies to compensate cultural default during translation, this thesis takes the relevance translation theory put forward by E.A. Gutt in 1991 as the theoretical framework. The goal of the thesis is to combine the target text readers’ expectations with the source text writer’s intention. Invisible Man is served as a case study of cultural default so as to seek the best compensation strategy. After the study of cultural default translation, it is argued that in the process of cultural default translation, the translator with subjectivity has always been seeking optimal relevance, and in that dual ostensive-inferential communication the translator work hard to build a shared cognitive context so as to complete a cross-cultural communication between the source text writer and the target text reader. And in order to successfully restore the source text writer’s intention, the translator has to make judgment and assumption of the target text readers’ cognitive context. Then, he should choose a cognitive context in his translation to achieve optimal relevance with the target text readers, and assume that the chosen cognitive context will reach the target text readers’ cognitive psychological expectation. Next, a dual ostensive–inferential communication is made to combine the source text writer’s intention with the target text readers’ expectation.In view of the above, optimal relevance is the standard for compensating cultural default. Different translation methods in translation practice should be adopted according to dynamic contexts such as direct translation with annotation, amplification and adaption. Therefore, the translator needs to overcome the limitation of his cognition, and make efforts to develop his bilingual cultural awareness and produce better works and make a contribution to cross-cultural communication.