A Study Of The Cultural Default And Compensation In The English Translations Of Selected Chinese Stories Of The Song And Ming Dynasties

Chinese classic works contains rich cultural connotation within themselves. In theprocess of introducing the Chinese culture to the western world, the English translation ofChinese classic works plays an important role. As a new branch of translation studies, thestudy of Chinese classics translations mainly focus on the comparative study of the text, andhas raised considerable concern among scholars. With the development of translation theoryin recent years, the translation of cultural information has began gaining attention. It hasbecame a new criterion to evaluate translation works that whether the cultural connotation hasbeen transmitted to the target text and the goal of cultural communications has finallyachieved. Among these translation studies of cultural factors, moreover, the cultural defaultand compensation in the Chinese classic works has attract extensive attention until now andshould be paid more attention in the future.In the1970s, scholars began to pay attention to the cultural factors in translation. Therelationship between culture and translation is review and redefined, and the culturaltranslation theory was put forward. The leading figure of this culture turn is Susan Bassnett,who hold that translation should be an communication process between different cultures, andhe equivalence of translation lies in the functional equivalence between source and target texts.Thus, language is not a pure linguistic behavior, but deeply roots in culture. Theestablishment of Susan Bassnett’s cultural translation theory offer a brand new viewpoint to translation study field, especially to theChinese classics translation field which involves more cultural factors. It also lead thetransformation of the translation study from the level of language to the cultural connotation,which has profound theoretical and practical meaning.Among the abundant Chinese classic translation works of the outstanding translators theYangs,“Selected Chinese Stories of Song and Ming Dynasties”, selected form the typicalPinghua novel “Sanyan Erpai”, is praised as “the most satisfied work” by Yang Xianyihimself. This thesis take the Yangs’ translation work “Selected Chinese Stories of Song andMing Dynasties” as the study object, choose Susan Bassnett’s cultural translation theory as thetheoretical frame. By looking up the detailed information about relevant Chinese culturalconnotations, the author analyzes the translations of cultural factors in this book, discussingtheir compensation when coming up with cultural default, state the merits and demerits in thisversion, so as to make a further suggestion for the study of Chinese classics translations. Withthe detailed analysis, the following conclusion can be achieved: there are three categories oftranslating compensation in Yangs’ version, namely, full compensation, part compensation,and no compensation. To which degree the cultural default be compensate depends on theextent of cultural shared by the source language and the target language, and is alsoinfluenced by the goal of the translators. Despite some defects, this version is a successfultranslation in cultural transmitting. By this thesis, the author also hopes to make a furthersuggestion for the study of Chinese classics translations.The thesis consists of six chapters including the instruction and conclusion. Chapter oneis the instruction in which the author put forward the research background, the reason and thepurpose of this study. Chapter two is literature review, in which the definitions of culturaldefault and translating compensation are put forward, and the research states of the studyobject is analyzed. The theoretical framework is formed in chapter three, including both thecontents and the significance of Susan Bassnett’s cultural translation theory. Information ofthe study object is introduced in chapter four, Both the original work and the translation arediscussed in detail. When this thesis comes to the chapter five the author classifies the culturalinformation in the object text into five categories, and then, based on Bassnett’s culturaltranslation theory, makes detailed analysis. The sixth chapter is the conclusion, in which the author sums up this paper and enlighten the theme.