The Cultural Default In English-chinese Translation Of Political Texts

This paper is an English-Chinese translation practice report,with American Prophecy:Race and Redemption in American Political Culture as the translation practice text.The first to fourth chapters are selected for translation practice.Translation problems during the translation process are solved by adopting different translation strategies.After the translation practice,these translation problems and strategies are summerized and the report written.The selected bibliography is a political text,with a lot of religious and social information.Therefore,in order to ensure the complete transmission of the information in the book,a large amount of information needs to be consulted.And the number of words should be controlled to reproduce the author's writing style.Because the original text contains a lot of cultural information and some of it is selfevident in source language which the author omitted when writing so a cultural default phenomenon has occured in this process.According to Eugene Nida's classification of culture,this article mainly studies cultural default phenomenon from the perspectives of religious culture and social culture.The translation strategies of amplification,liberal translation,and footnote are used.Finally,concluding methods can be used for differnent types of cultural default in political text.Through this translation practice and report writing,the translator herself has improved her translation abilities and problem solving abilities.Her understanding of cultural defaults and the religious culture and social culture in the source text has been deepened.Concentrating on the strategies and methods while translating political text and handling cultrual default.In this report trying to provide a referance example for later scholars of similar text and study type.