A Contrastive Study On Compensation Of Cultural Default In Lin Yutang’s And Ryden’s Translation Of Daodejing From Relevance Theory

Daodejing constitutes one of the most representative Chinese traditional classics.It is also the earliest philosophical work with a complete theoretical system in China,fully demonstrating the abundant connotations of Chinese ideologies and culture.With the maximum number of translated versions among Chinese classics to date,Daodejing represents its strong power of cultural communication and influence.The wide dissemination of its linguistic characteristics and ideological connotations in the west play a pivotal role in the dissemination of Chinese culture as well.What’s more,translators of Daodejing are large in quantity with diverse cultural and historical backdrops and nationalities,and thus the translation of Daodejing is worthy of a contrastive study.Relevance Theory is a proposal by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson,which holds that verbal communication is a cognitive process.Constituted as a vitally significant linguistic theory,Relevance Theory constantly develops through the joint efforts of scholars at home and abroad,and such relevant theories have been successively put forward as principles of relevance,ostensive-inferential communication,equal inferential distance principle,communicative clues and the like,which provide novel theoretical study perspectives for translation practices.This dissertation takes Relevance Theory as the theoretical foundation,selects Lin Yutang’s and Edmund Ryden’s English versions as the source texts of this contrastive study,mainly employs the methods of contrastive and inductive analysis,adopts both qualitative and quantitative research methods,and analyzes the corpus by means of the corpus analysis software SPSS,and contrasts the methods of compensation in translating cultural default to the target language,and probes into the relevance significance of the cultural default in the corpus of the source text and the English compensation for cultural default,and attempts to construct cultural default compensation model based on Relevance Theory,with a view to summarizing the applicability of Relevance Theory in the Chinese classics’ English translation.It is found that Relevance Theory does have a certain guiding role in the cultural default compensation.Through the analysis of the specific examples,the author proposes five cultural default compensations,including substituting compensation to ecological cultural default,interpreting compensation to material cultural default,innovating compensation to social cultural default,“thick” compensation to religious cultural default,and omitting compensation to linguistic cultural default.The author summarizes Lin Yutang’s and Edmund Ryden’s cultural default compensation models respectively from their translation strategies,and puts forward integrated models accordingly.This dissertation attempts to summarize effective cultural default compensation model by the contrastive study to offer some references for Chinese classics translation.