文学作品翻译中的文化缺省与翻译补偿_英语论文

A Study of Cultural Default and Translation Compensation in Translating Literary Works

摘要

众所周知，翻译不仅是实现语言转换的过程，而且是不同语言中独特文化和思维方式的交流过程。在某种程度上来说，翻译是一种跨文化交际的活动。对于译者来说，翻译时不仅要克服语言的障碍，还要克服文化的障碍。而且，文化障碍往往比语言障碍更加棘手。在文化障碍中，存在着这样一种现象：因作者与源语言读者有相同的文化背景，所以原作者通常会省略一些不言而喻的文化信息，这种现象被称为文化缺省。译者在对待文化缺省时，有时很难辨认出它，即使辨认出，也很难正确处理它。 一旦碰上文学作品中的文化缺省，那就更为棘手。因其带有浓厚的艺术价值和主观色彩，译者处理起来往往一头雾水。

本文旨在借助于文学作品中的一些实例来研究文化缺省，包括其定义，生成机制以及对翻译造成的问题。此外，本文还提出一些方法来补偿目标语中的文化缺省以期给读者带来理想的文学译作。

关键词：文化缺省；翻译 ；补偿；文学作品

Abstract

As is known to all, translation is not only a process of achieving language transformation , but also a course of exchanging the unique cultures and thinking modes in different languages. In a sense, translation is an activity of cross-culture communication. For translators, they are required to overcome the obstacles of both language and culture in translation. What’s more, cultural barrier is more complicated than language barrier. In cultural barrier, there is  one phenomenon that translators may often meet: Due to the fact that the author has the same cultural background with the source language( SL) readers, the author may omit some cultural information which is self-evident to both sides.This phenomenon is called cultural default. When faced with cultural default, translators sometimes cannot recognize it easily. Even if recognizing it successfully, they will also find it difficult to deal with the cultural default properly. It would be worse once translators come across the cultural default in literary works. Because of profound artistic value and subjectivity in literary works, translators tend to feel puzzled about what to do when they are confronted with cultural default.

This paper aims to study the cultural default on literary translation with the help of some examples from literary works, exploring its definition, formation mechanism and some problems caused by cultural default. In addition, the thesis also proposes some measures to compensate for the cultural default in the target language for the purpose of bringing ideal literary translation to the readers .  

Keywords: Cultural Default; translation; compensation; literary works

Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Literature Review 3

3. Cultural Default 4

3.1 Definitions of default and cultural default 4

3.2 Formation mechanism of cultural default 5

4. Possible Translation Problems Caused by Cultural Default 7

4.1 Undertranslation 7

4.2 Mistranslation 7

4.3 Overtranslation 8

5. Cultural Default Compensation 9

5.1Two principles on compensation for cultural default 9

5.2 Methods of cultural default compensation 11

6. Conclusion 14

Works Cited 15