A Study on Cultural Default and Compensation in C-E Translation of Soft News from the Perspective of Relevance Theory: A Case Study of China Daily in 2022

Abstract

Cultural default and compensation play an important role not only in literary translation, but also in many non-literary translation fields, including news translation. Under the guidance of relevance theory, this paper takes the bilingual soft news of China Daily as the materials adopts the literature method and case analysis method to examine the cultural defaults in the translation process of soft news, and finds out the appropriate compensation strategies. Through research, it is found that the most common cultural defaults in soft news are linguistic cultural defaults, followed by social cultural defaults, material cultural defaults, ecological cultural defaults and religious cultural defaults. In addition, reconstruction, transliteration and transplantation are common compensation strategies in translation, which need to be adjusted flexibly according to translation requirements. This study is expected to provide some reference for the translation of soft news and attract more scholars’ attention to cultural default and compensation in soft news translation, so as to improve the translation quality of soft news.