A Report On E-C Translation Of Cultural Default From The Perspective Of Translation Compensation Theory

As a common phenomenon in people’s daily communication,cultural default plays an important role in the same cultural background.However,if a translator didn’t compensate for the elements of cultural default,they would cause misunderstandings and even lead to communicative failure for both parties from different cultural backgrounds.It can be seen that dealing with the phenomena on cultural default has become an extremely important part in translation practice.The corpus of this translation practice report is selected from Nigel Hamilton’s documentary literature work The Mantle of Command:FDR At War,1941-1942.It not only involves a lot of complex characters,events,religion,shipbuilding and military knowledge,but also uses a large number of idioms,metaphors,and some words or phrases that can reflect the social phenomena at that time.In order to improve the coherence of contexts and enable target readers to understand the translated work better,this report tentatively probes into the feasible compensation strategies and methods on cultural defaults under the guidance of the translation compensation theory.Guided by Prof.Xia Tingde’s translation compensation theory,this translation report explores the specific compensation methods for the cultural defaults in the source text based on the three of his eight compensation strategies:the compensation by integration,the compensation by isolation,and the compensation in a parallel.With regard to rewriting the religious culture,the author translates the biblical lexis and the religious illusions by conversion plus free translation and by literal translation plus imitation under the guidance of the compensation by integration.For the compensation for social cultural default,the author,guided by the compensation by isolation,translates the words with historical features by paraphrase plus annotation within text and compensates for the military geographical names by the means of amplification plus footnotes.In view of the isomorph of linguistic culture,the author adopts the methods of adaptation and semantic translation to translate idioms,realizing the compensation of metaphors by reconstruction plus dilution.Through this translation practice,the following conclusions can be drawn:1)When translating words,phrases and sentences containing cultural defaults,translators must have a thorough understanding of their background knowledge,and then reproduce their implied meaning,style and imagery of the source text in the translation through appropriate translation strategies and translation methods,so that the source text and the target text can achieve the same or similar effects in terms of cultural connotation,writing style and pragmatic functions;2)No matter what kind of compensation strategy and translation method are adopted,translators should be faithful to the source text and control the scale of compensation while respecting the cultural differences between the source language and the target language;3)According to the characteristics of documentary literature,namely,historical objectivity and literary artistry,the author should not only focus on the faithfulness of the translation,but also take into account its literariness during the process of translation.