A Comparative Study Of Cultural Default And Its Reconstruction In English Versions Of The Analects From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

China is facing a drastic turn in the latest two hundred years or so.China's economy and culture will make great strides amid the Belt and Road Initiative.The Analects has been regarded as a both philosophical and ethical canon for Chinese for over two thousand years.Up to now,the number of English versions of The Analects has reached over sixty since its first version was published in 1861.Despite its relatively long translation history,the influence of The Analects abroad is rather limited.With foreigners as their prospective readers,translators such as Ding Wangdao,D.C.Lau,Ku Hung-ming and Wu Guozhen dedicate themselves to the dissemination of Chinese traditional culture.Their English versions of The Analects enjoy relatively high praise but their value has been overlooked.In this research,the four English versions,that is,D.C.Lau(1992),Ding Wangdao(1998),Ku Humg-ming(2013)and Wu Guozhen(2015)are chosen as the objects.Guided by of the relevance theory(RT),a comparative research on the cultural default and its reconstruction in the four English versions is conducted.There are some major findings:Firstly,cultural default in The Analects is expressed through the adoption of culture-loaded words such as proper names,numbers and other expressions with Chinese characteristics as well as some rhetorical devices like allusion,parallelism,etc.However,sometimes the cultural information underlying those words and expressions is alien to the TL readers,which calls for translators to make some reconstruction accordingly.Secondly,there are both similarities and differences in the reconstruction of the cultural default: it's a practice for translators to render proper names by resorting to the strategies of cultural transplantation or cultural annotation while when it comes to the translation of some culture-loaded words,translators are apt to make different choices in reconstructing the default cultural information.From the perspective of the RT,there are also some places of the four translations where improvements could bemade.Thirdly,this research is also a confirmation that RT enjoys a great explanatory power on translation,in line with which it is enlightening for a translator to abide by the principle of optimal relevance making the utterance most relevant to the TL readers.Based on the findings above,some modest suggestions are made: it is critical for translators to have an approximately correct understanding of the author's communicative intentions before they translate The Analects;besides,a systematic research on readers' expectations and the reception of the existing translations is of great urgency.