Compensation Strategies In The Translation Of Jiangxun Talks About A Dream Of Red Mansions

Translation is not only the communication between two languages but also between two cultures. Reading is a communication between the author and the reader. Wang Dongfeng defines cultural default as the omission of the shared cultural knowledge of the two parties in a communication. Hence, compensation strategies should be adopted in translation to deal with the cultural default. Wang summarized five compensation strategies: adding footnotes, explaining within the text, domestication, omission and imposed translation.The selected part of the book Jiangxun Talks about A Dream of Red Mansions contains plenty of Chinese cultural elements. The translator adopted the compensation strategies of adding footnotes, explaining within the text and domestication to deal with the possible cultural default, through which the implicit logic is rendered explicit. For those proper nouns including the names of books, people and places which carry cultural connotations and those containing China's history or astronomic achievement, the translator explained them by adding footnotes. For those people's names which have homophonic implications, those Chinese mythical stories and those terms of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism, the translator explained them within the text. For those images or concepts with Chinese characteristics and do not exist in western culture, the translator adopted domestication strategy. Besides, the writer of this report also elucidates the situations in which different strategies can be applied. Adding footnotes applies to the part containing many cultural connotations which form the implicit logic. Explaining within the text applies to the cultural implications which are easy to explain. Domestication applies to the cultural image or concept which does not exist in the foreign culture.