Cultural Default and Translation Compensation in Red Poppies

Abstract

Cultural default is a common phenomenon in literary works. It will not cause obstacles to the understanding of original readers who share cultural background with the author, but for readers of the target language, cultural differences may create vacuum of meaning for them, so it is necessary to make compensation for the cultural default in the translation process. Taking Red Poppies as the research object, this paper makes a classified study of cultural default, and analyzes the compensation methods in Howard Goldblatt’s translation.