A Cognitive Analysis Of Cultural Default In The Translation Of Hongloumeng

Cultural default is a common phenomenon in literary works, which is a way to improve the communication between the author and his intended readers. It can provide readers imaginary space and increase aesthetic feeling of the literature. Under different social backgrounds, every nation has its own culture and languages, making their use and comprehension of language greatly different. The cultural default in the source text is convenient to the comprehension of the intended readers, while it may cause the misunderstanding for some foreign readers. Hence the translation of cultural default has a great influence to the cultural exchange.For more and more cross-cultural communication, translation of the classics has become more and more important as the way of cultural exchange in the world. As an encyclopedia of Chinese feudal culture, Hongloumeng includes abundant Chinese history and cultural deposits, which is inevitable to be rich in cultural default phenomena. Hence, how to deal with the cultural default correctly has gradually got hold of the translators’attention. The introduction of cognitive linguistics has provided us with a new perspective in translation. In the cognitive study of translation, it is found that people with different cultures may form different cognitive contexts which have a great effect on their cognitive abilities of the outside world. Especially for the translation of cultural default, the target readers usually misunderstand the meaning of default in the source text because of the discrepancy of cognitive context. However, the scholars just make cognitive context as a concept of relevance theory in their cognitive analyses of cultural default in translation. Therefore, it will be necessary to study the translation of cultural default from cognitive contextual perspective. Based on the translation of cultural default in the Yang’s version of Hongloumeng, this thesis tries to analyze some effective translation methods of cultural default and some common translation problems from the perspective of cognitive context. The author intends to demonstrate the importance of cognitive context in the cultural comprehension with comparative analysis of differences between the Chinese culture and English culture. By analyzing the translation of cultural default in the English version, this paper tries to illustrate that the translator’s translation methods have enormous influence on the target readers’cognitive context which plays an important role in the cultural transmission from source language information to target language information. At last, this paper points out that the influence of cognitive context should be considered into account in translation of a literature, which can help the translator choose the proper translation with the purpose of cross-cultural communication.