A Study On Cultural Default Translation In The Three Word Primer From The Perspective Of Relevance-theoretic Translation Theory

As one of the Chinese traditional classics,the great and successful English versions of San Zi Jing(or The Three-Character Classic literally),are significant and play an essential role in Chinese cultural transmission.While translating this great original work,translators will encounter a great deal of cultural defaults phenomena.These unique expression forms exactly and vividly exhibit the unique features of Chinese essence,both in culture and language.However,these specific expressions are the main barriers and difficulty for translators to complete their work.The Three Word Primer gives readers a panoramic and fantastic view of this classic and Chinese culture and it is a successful translated version.There is no need for the source language writer to provide all possible information to his intended source language readers and cultural default occurs when the original writer omits some relevant cultural background information shared with his intended readers.In translation activity,the source language writer and the target language readers seldom share the same cultural background knowledge because of their different social and cultural communities.Thus cultural default arises for the target language readers.To some extent,cultural defaults are the problems for translators to balance the intention of the original writer and the inferential ability of the target language readers.The Relevance Theory claims that communication is an ostensive-inferential process and optimal relevance is the core to successful communication.Gutt applied the Relevance Theory into the study of translation and put forward the concept of Relevance-theoretic Translation Theory.Gutt points out that translation is a dynamic process of dual inferential-ostensive communication,and the translator plays a kind of dual role in the whole process.The optimal relevance is what a translator strives for and at the same time,the optimal relevance principle is the guideline for translation activity.A translator aims to look for optimal relevance to guarantee that the source language writer's intention and the target language readers' expectation are in line with each other.The Relevance-theoretic Translation Theory plays an essential role in the studies and researches of cultural defaults.This thesis will give an analysis on translation of cultural defaults in The Three Word Primer translated by Zhao Yanchun from the perspective of the Relevance-theoretic Translation Theory.The combination of these databases and the Relevance-theoretic Translation Theory provides translators a new way to analyze translation phenomenon.This thesis aims to find out those factors that influence the translators' choices in the translating process,to find out the nature of translation and how the translator makes optimal relevance,and finally to prove that the Relevance-theoretic Translation Theory has great power in illustrating the translation of cultural default phenomena.This thesis finds out that when translating cultural default phenomena,cultural element is an inevitable factor.The translator should,first of all,have enough cross-cultural linguistic background knowledge and ability to ensure that they can make proper assumptions of the original writer's informative intention and communicative intention and thus form their own communicative intention to convey.And then by considering the target language readers' cognitive environment,they should reconstruct those cultural defaults as to guarantee successful translation.In The Three Word Primer,Zhao Yanchun remains the unique poetic and three-character characteristics of the original work to faithfully convey the original writer's informative intention.In addition,he adopts different translating methods to spread the original writer's communicative intention to the target language readers and to make them gain the most similar relevance and the most resemble contextual effect without making unnecessary processing effort.And he adopts the parodic method to deal with these cultural defaults,which depicts the implied meaning of words and provides a new way to bring Chinese culture to the world.