Cultural Default And Translation Compensation In English-Chinese Translation Of Novels

Translation of literary works can be regarded as a kind of cross-cultural communication activity that serves the purpose of promoting cultural exchanges between different countries and nations.Due to the cultural differences between the source language text and the target language text,readers of a translated literary work may encounter difficulties in understanding the cultural descriptions if the translator fails to properly deal with the problem of cultural default that may frequently occur in literary works translated into other languages.Translators of foreign literary works,in this sense,need to develop a keen awareness of and find effective ways to compensate for such cultural defaults in the process of translation to improve the coherence of the context and enable a better understanding of the translated work by the target readership.This paper is a case study based on the English-Chinese translation of Thomas Hardy's novel The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid.The basic information about the translation program and the novel is described in the first part of the paper.In the second part,the paper focuses on the definition of cultural default and previous researches on this topic.Based on these theoretical researches,all kinds of cultural defaults that occurs in the translation program are listed in the paper.Finally,the paper aims to figure out a proper strategy to best compensate such cultural defaults.