Cultural Default And Translation Compensation Based On Cultural Schema Theory

After schema was put forward by Kant in philosophy,it was widely applied in various areas especially in second language acquisition.As a subtype of schema,cultural schema was also paid much attention to.Translation especially literary translation is not only a shift of languages but also a shift of cultures,and the communication of different cultural schemas.The writer will omit relevant cultural background information shared by him and his readers,which is called cultural default.This kind of default will not affect the communication between the writer and his readers because they possess the same cultural schema.Living in different natural and social environment,the translator and the target readers may lack of corresponding cultural schema.The translator needs to decode the cultural schema of the source language and re-encode in target language.As a great work of foreign literature,Gone with the Wind is not only a love story in war but an encyclopedia of American southern plantation.There are not many researches on the translations of Gone with the Wind,and most of them mainly touched upon its characters,writing techniques and plot of the story.The rich cultural information was paid little attention to.The paper aims to provide a new perspective for the appreciation and research of Gone with the Wind based on its rich cultural elements and some suggestions for the translation compensation methods of cultural default.Target readers comprehend the target text based on their prior knowledge which is the schema stored in their minds.As for the understanding of the cultural information,it is up to their cultural schema.Through qualitative analysis and case study,the paper finds that literal translation and literal translation with notes can help target readers build new cultural schema to spread the source culture and enrich the target language.