Study On Cultural Default In Translation From The Perspective Of Linguistic Adaptation Theory

Language is the carrier of culture,thus translation is not only the transformation of linguistic signs,but the cultural exchanges of different nations.In communication among those from the same linguistic-cultural background,one can omit those self-evident facts so as to improve the communicative efficiency because they have common cultural background knowledge or cognitive schemata.However,in translation,the target readers are not equipped with the same cultural schema as that of the original author,thus what is self-evident in the source culture often causes the semantic vacuum and cognitive discontinuity of the target readers.Cultural default frequently appears as a barrier for translation.For this reason,it is necessary to probe into the cultural default in translation so as to achieve successful cross-cultural communication between the original author and the target readers.So far,extensive studies on the cultural default in translation have been conducted by means of interdisciplinary approaches.However,there are still some problems which remain to be solved.For instance,the linguistic approach only stresses the formal or functional equivalence between the source text and the target text and neglects various social,cultural and cognitive factors constraining the translation activity,while the social-cultural approach lays too much emphasis on the macro factors and undermines the position of the source text in translation,thereby shadowing the ontological construction of translation.Still,the cognitive-psychological approach focuses on the translator's mental mechanism in translation activity.However,it seems too ideal and abstract and fails to work out specific suggestions on how to compensate for the target readers' cultural default.Anyway,previous studies only manifest one single aspect of cultural default and fail to provide a comprehensive and coherent interpretation of it.For this reason,the present study attempts to employ Verschueren's Linguistic Adaptation Theory to investigate the cultural default in translation.Verschueren advocates to examine the use of language in an overall and coherent manner.He claims that language use must take into account the full complexity of its linguistic,social,cultural and cognitive functioning.In other words,language use consists of the continuous making of choices,consciously or unconsciously,for language-internal(i.e.Structural)and/or language-external reasons(Verschueren,1999:56).Language use is the process of continuous choice-making and dynamic adaptation.To illustrate this process,he proposes three properties and four angles of language use,which provides the theoretical basis for the present study.In accordance with the Adaptation Theory,compensation for cultural default is also a process of continuous choice-making and dynamic adaptation.Language is characterized by three properties——variability,negotiability and adaptability,which provide the possibility for the compensation for cultural default.Linguistic adaptation can be approached from four angles:contextual correlates of adaptability,structural correlates of adaptability,dynamics of adaptability and salience of adaptability,which provide the guidance for the compensation for cultural default.The present study intends to explore how the translator compensates for cultural default in translation from these four angles.Specially speaking,the contextual adaptation refers to the adaptation to the physical world,social world and mental world.The structural adaptation covers the adaptation at phonetic,lexical,syntactic and discourse levels.Dynamics of adaptation includes the dynamic adaptation to contextual-structural correlates and the dynamic use of translation strategies.Salience of adaptation refers to the translator's different degrees of consciousness in compensating for cultural default.In brief,compensation for cultural default in translation is the process of dynamic adaptation to the contextual-structural correlates at different degrees of salience.Due to its complexity and comprehensiveness,the present study also relies on ample examples to explore how the translator makes dynamic choices and adaptation in SL and TL environments so as to compensate for target readers' cultural default.In addition,by means of Social Psychological Theories,Reception Aesthetics Theory and Cross-cultural Communicative Theories,the present study also proposes the compensation principles of cognitive consonance,aesthetic appreciation and cultural exploration so as to guide the translator to make appropriate choices and adaptation in SL and TL environments.Anyway,it is hoped that the present study can help decrease the barriers in cross-cultural translation.Besides,the study also hopes to expand the applied realms of Linguistic Adaptation Theory and to prove its feasibility in translation studies.