A Study On Cultural Default And Translation Compensation In The Song Of King Gesar From The Perspective Of Interpretive Theory

Chinese ethnic classics are rich and diverse,they are an indispensable part of Chinese culture and also a rare intangible cultural heritage in human literature.The Song of King Gesar is a novel written on the basis of the Tibetan heroic epic poem Gesar by Alai.This novel was translated into English by American Sinologist Howard Goldblatt and published in 2013.The Song of King Gesar contains abundant Chinese cultural elements and reflects profound traditional Tibetan culture.Due to the differences in cognitive environment,Western readers lack relevant cognition of cultural images in this novel,which leads to cultural default.Therefore,translators need to make corresponding translation compensation in translation to achieve meaning equivalence between the source language and target language.Interpretative Theory innovatively puts forward the concept of “meaning equivalence”,pointing out that the translator should through the understanding of the source language symbols and add their corresponding cognitive supplement,deverbalization,and convey the equivalent meanings of source text,express the meaning of the source text.Therefore,this study uses the Interpretive theory to study the cultural default and translation compensation in The Song of King Gesar.This paper is a case study of the English translation The Song of King Gesar based on the Interpretative Theory.First of all,according to Nida’s classification of culture,the author classifies the cultural default in the novel,then,to deal with these cultural default,according to the three translation steps proposed by the Interpretation theory,to analyze the translation compensation that translator used to help the target language readers understand the meaning of source language culture.It is found that among the five kinds of cultural default of ecological culture,material culture,social culture,religious culture and linguistic culture in The Song of King Gesar,the religious culture default is the most frequent kind,which is mainly reflected in some terminology terms of Tibetan Buddhism.For these cultural default,the translator does not pay attention to the surface equivalence of words,but is faithful to the deep meaning of the language,adding his own cognitive understanding and emotional supplement,breaking free from the constraint of the source language,and reproducing the connotation of the cultural default in the novel by the translation strategies of explicit compensation and implicit compensation.Through analysis,it can be seen that the translator is more inclined to the target language reader.The translation is concise,the plot is smooth,and the reading barrier is limited.This study applies the Interpretative theory to the study of cultural default and translation compensation of minority literature,to explore the effective ways of minority literature translation,hoping to provide some reference to enrich the study of Chinese literature translation,especially the translation of minority literature works.