Topic: The Strategies on Compensation for Cultural Default in Translatoral Action

Time: 15:00-17:00 Oct. 30,2014

Venue: A421, Building 6

Participants: Doctoral students, teaching staff and senior visiting scholars

Chairperson: Pro. Zeng Lisha    

Speaker: Shao Xingyu & Pro. Zeng Lisha

Recorder in English: Lv Jie

The forum started by a presentation given by Shao Xingyu, Ph.D candidate, on the topic “The Strategies on Compensation for Cultural Default in Translatoral Action”. The presentation covered eight points, focusing on such issues as Iser’s theory of aesthetic response, schema-theory-based approach, literature review on the compensation for cultural default in translatoral action and Shao’s own views on the relevant topic. Mr. Shao’s review on the previous studies was clearly brief and types of compensation were introduced with cases-based explanation.   

The forum was followed by thought-provoking comments from Pro. Zeng Lisha, who first pointed out the problems in current researches on the abovementioned topic and then delivered an insightful speech on “The Strategies on Compensation for Cultural Default in Literary Translation: A Schema Theory-based Approach on Achieving Online Aesthetic Perception”. The conception of “online” excluded the situation when endnotes or footnotes were used as ways to compensate for cultural default in translation of literary works, which, as Pro. Zeng argued against, was not theoretically or practically significant from the academic research perspective. He held that it was rather difficult but methodologically necessary to achieve the equivalent online aesthetic effect on TL readers while cultural default arose. With demonstration of some vivid examples, he explored the application of schemata-based approach to academic studies of compensation strategy for achieving the desired online-aesthetic reception from the target readers’ cognitive efforts which required building up schemata such as Event Schema and Gender-specific taste on body parts of the other sex. The demonstration brought an inspiration to those present in data collection and typical case analysis from the approach of schema theory. 

A discussion was followed on how to carry out an indepth research by application of categorization of schemata such as conceptual schema, knowledge schema and cognitive schema. Pro. Zeng emphasized that to achieve that goal bottom-up oriented studies were important for inductive generalization of typical cases collected from translating practice may lead to more findings of schemata that function as a feasible means of compensating the culture-specific defaulted content with preservation of the aesthetic taste to a certain extent on the target readers’ part.

The forum ended with a great success by inspiring each participant on the topic presented and on the scientific ways of carrying out academic research.