Cultural Default And Translation Strategies In China's International Publicity Documentary From Relevance Theory Perspective

International publicity translation, as an essential link for China to communicate with the world, plays a critical role in both facilitating intercultural communication and establishing China's international image. Televised documentaries, as an audiovisual medium, are an efficient approach in international publicity, transmitting Chinese culture internationally within creative expressions. However, because there are numerous culturally specific elements in the narration of China's international publicity documentaries, phenomena of cultural default in intercultural communication will inevitably emerge. Cultural default may block target language audiences' comprehension as well as appreciation of cultural elements in documentaries, thus hampering communicative effects of Chinese culture in international publicity. Therefore, researches on how to address the cultural default efficiently, becomes a new subject in international publicity translation studies.Relevance theory has provided a new perspective to study international publicity documentary translation. Based on Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson's relevance theory, Ernest Gutt proposes a relevance-theoretical approach to translation. He believes, translation is a special form of communication between two languages, which is a dual ostensive-inferential process involving the source language author, the translator and the target language audience. The translator shoulders asymmetrical responsibility to infer both the explicatures and implicatures of the original author, to consider the cognitive environment of the target language audience and to seek for optimal relevance between the source language and the target language. That is to ensure the target language audiences yield adequate contextual effects with the least processing efforts. From a relevance theory perspective, cultural default is reckoned as a cognitive phenomenon, which resulted from target language audience's lack of intersected cognitive environments on particular cultural elements with the original author.Under the guidance of relevance theory, this thesis discusses the cultural default and the translation strategies in international publicity documentary by conducting a case study of A Bite of China I, which has witnessed successful communication effects in English speaking countries. All the seven episodes of the documentary have been first transcribed into a Chinese and English Version respectively by the author and during the three-months process, all the transcripts have also been proof-read for three times. Then three groups of cultural default in A Bite of China I: material, social and linguistic cultural default are summarized. Moreover, the author conducts a limited analysis to the five strategies employed by the translator to deal with default cultural elements. They are transplantation, substitution, amplification, filtration and omission. For each strategy, typical examples are all selected from A Bite of China I. Finally the thesis comes to the conclusion that translation to cultural default is a dynamic process, which requires the translator to use flexible strategies making the author's intentions meet with the audiences' expectations.