A Report On E-C Translation Of Historical Fiction Ashoka The Great (Excerpts) From The Perspective Of Translation Compensation

Ashoka the Great is a historical fiction about the legendary life of Ashoka(304-232 BCE),who was the greatest emperor of the Maurya Dynasty in ancient India.Though the book based on real history is interspersed with a lot of ficticious plots,it is virtually a panorama of society at that time.And its application to superb narrative skills and mature description techniques make it easy to arouse readers’ strong interest in the development of the plot and the fates of characters.Due to the cultural differences between China and India,the book is full of culture-loaded words and expressions that are unique to India but unknown to people from other countries.Cultural default refers to the omission of common cultural background knowledge by both parties in the process of communication in order to improve communicative efficiency.Writing is actually a kind of communicative between writers and readers.Writers and their intended readers often have the same cultural background,therefore cultural default has become a common phenomenon in translation.However,this is nothing short of a roadblock for readers from different cultural backgrounds.Without the corresponding cultural knowledge,it is impossible for them to make associations in cultural defaults and to understand the writer’s intentions.Therefore the translator must make relevant compensations in cultural defaults during the process of translation to clear the reading barriers for the target language readers as well as achieve the equivalence between the target text and the source text.Based on the author’s translation practice,this report takes the E-C translation of historical fiction Ashoka the Great as the research object to explore the cultural default phenomenon in the book and the application of translation compensation.