Cultural Default in China’s Foreign external Publicity Texts and Its Translation Strategies

Abstract

This paper discusses cultural default in external publicity translation and its translation strategies. External publicity, as a cross-cultural communication activity, aims to convey China's political ideas, cultural traditions and development achievements to the international community. However, the cognitive differences between China and the West in ecological, material, social, religious and linguistic and cultural aspects have led to a meaning vacuum of source language cultural information in the target language context, resulting in cultural default. In order to compensate for the impact of cultural default on Sino-foreign communication, translators usually adopt explicit and implicit compensation translation strategies: the former uses literal translation and annotations to make the cultural background explicit; the latter uses free translation, naturalization and other means to achieve semantic reconstruction and cultural adaptation. Research shows that the reasonable use of compensation strategies can strike a balance between preserving cultural authenticity and improving communication effectiveness, avoiding both the understanding barriers caused by excessive alienation and the cultural dilution caused by naturalization, thereby optimizing the cross-cultural communication effect of external publicity texts.