Compensation Strategies For Cultural Defaults In Literary Translation:from The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Under the framework of relevance theory, this commentary focuses on the use of compensation strategies to handle problems of cultural defaults in the course of literary translation.Cultural default is a cultural phenomenon which means the absence of explicit mention in the literary work of relevant cultural background knowledge shared by the author and his/her intended source text readers. If the translator is not able to deal with cultural defaults, it would create obstacles to readers. This commentary applies Relevance Theory to the dealing with cultural defaults. The optimal relevance is the goal that a translator should achieve, and it is also the criterion of translation studies. According to Relevance Translation Theory, to achieve the optimal relevance, in the process of translation, the translator should explore the intention of the author and have a full understanding of the cognitive environment of the target language readers.Based on the principle of optimum relevance, I employed three strategies when encountering cases of cultural defaults in the course of translation.(1) If there is no hidden information in the cultural default, a direct translation with a footnote is the best way to adopt.(2) If the cultural default does contain hidden information and the target text readers must have such information in order to appreciate the literary work, literal translation with an explanation is preferable.(3) If the hidden information is too hard to explain and such explanation does not facilitate the appreciation of the work, it is advisable to leave the hidden information out.These different strategies, employed in different cognitive contexts, serve to realize the purpose of the source text author and cater to expectations of target language readers.