Cultural Compensation Strategies in Museum Artifact Descriptions from a Cross-Cultural Perspective: A Case Study of the National Museum of China
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Keywords
cultural compensation, museum translation, Trompenaars’ cultural dimensions, cultural value orientation, cross-cultural communication
Abstract
Bilingual descriptions of museum artifacts serve as an important medium for disseminating Chinese culture to international audiences. Given the widespread presence of cultural defaults and implicit information in Chinese artifact descriptions, purely literal translation often fails to convey their deeper cultural meanings effectively. Drawing on five representative bilingual artifact descriptions from the official website of the National Museum of China as the corpus, this study incorporates Trompenaars’ cultural dimensions theory to examine the cultural compensation strategies employed in the translation process and the differences in cultural value orientations they reflect. The findings indicate that Chinese texts typically presuppose a shared historical and cultural background among readers, exhibiting characteristics of ascription orientation, communitarianism, synchronic time orientation, and inner-directed harmony. English texts, by contrast, make information explicit through transliteration with annotation, background addition, and functional substitution, thereby shifting the expressive logic toward achievement orientation, individualism, sequential time orientation, and outer-directed control. Cultural compensation not only bridges informational gaps in cross-cultural understanding, but also reflects a dynamic adjustment of value orientations, thereby enhancing the international communicative effectiveness of museum discourse.
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