Cultural Default And Its Solutions In Translating Publicity Materials

Because of the growing demand for communication with the international world, various publicity materials have become an extremely important and influential channel to publicize China and present China in the world stage, so the translation of publicity materials has played a more and more important role. The translation quality has an important impact on the communication effect. Translation with a good quality will convey correct information about China to the outside world and make people truthfully know a developing country. Publicity materials have particular characteristics of informative and vocative texts, whose readers are mainly those who do not know much about China. The translation of publicity materials should convey truthful and objective information for foreign readers to better know the different aspects of China so as to achieve effective communication and promote mutual understanding and cooperation. Cultural default, a commonly seen but often ignored cultural phenomenon, is defined as the absence of relevant cultural background knowledge shared by the author and his/her intended readers. The construction of the coherence of cultural default in a text is secured in that the readers can retrieve the relevant cultural information from their memory schemata. But in translation, since it is culture-specific and the cognitive environment of the source text writer and that of the target text reader are different, cultural default of the original texts often turns out to be tough, and may probably lead in misleading or incoherent understanding in cross-cultural communication. The misleading and misunderstanding may greatly affect the communication effect of foreign publicity materials, with its foreign-readership-oriented particularity.The thesis contains translation part and expositions part, I translate part of The Bund in the translation part,and in the expositions part, I attempts to take the translation of The Bund as an example and analyze the cultural default phenomenon and meanwhile discuss the cultural default in foreign publicity materials. The solution will also be studied in a tentative way. Hope this thesis will be useful to those who work in diplomatic field.