C-E Translation Of Cultural Defaults Guided By Relevance Theory

Cultural default is the omission of common cultural background knowledge shared by the communication parties in accordance with the economic principles of communication.In cross-cultural communication,both the source and target language readers come from different cultural backgrounds with varying personal experiences and cognitive environments,making the translation of cultural defaults an essential consideration.Effective cross-cultural translation requires transmitting not only the linguistic forms,but also the cultural implications and connotations.This translation practice,with the collection of essays Fun in the World written by food critic Chua Lam as the source text,places emphasis on the translation of cultural defaults in the excerpt.In terms of style,the essays are mostly short narrative proses with many colloquial expressions such as idioms and slangs.In terms of contents,the essays contain a lot of Chinese cultural elements such as historical allusions,religious beliefs,local specialties and customs.This report,under the guidance of Relevance Theory,takes optimal relevance as the principle of translation.This thesis presents specific translating methods for achieving optimal relevance by examining the translation of cultural defaults across material,social,religious and linguistic aspects:(1)for translation of material cultural defaults,the translator mainly employs “annotation” to explain the defaulted cultural information,including “transliteration with footnotes”,“literal translation with footnotes” and“free translation with footnotes”;(2)for translation of social cultural defaults,“contextual amplification”,“transliteration with inline explanations” and “literal translation with footnotes” are adopted to better convey connotative meanings of the defaulted social culture;(3)for translation of religious cultural defaults,different ways of annotation are employed,including “literal translation with footnotes”,“transliteration with footnotes” and “transliteration with inline explanations plus footnotes”;(4)for translation of linguistic cultural defaults,“paraphrase”,“substitution”,“contextual amplification”,“transliteration with inline explanations” and“literal translation with inline explanations” are flexibly used.With the above translating methods,the translation can effectively convey the connotations of the cultural defaults in the original text,make the target readers obtain adequate contextual effects with no unjustifiable effort,thus achieving the optimal relevance.Through analysis of the translation of cultural defaults from the viewpoint of Relevance Theory,this thesis hopes to serve as a reference for future translation practices and studies in this area.