1.1 Research Background and Objective of the paper

As one of the most popular literary genres, detective fiction attracts millions of readers for its meticulous inference, tortuous plots and entertaining stories. However, Chinese detective fiction had not been paid much attention to for a long time until the publication of Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee, edited by Robert Hans van Gulik. This literary work describes the stories of a famous Chinese detective—Judge Dee, and his celebrated cases. After its publication, the influence of Judge Dee and his stories expanded rapidly in the Western countries, which changes their attitude towards the Orient. And the publication of its E-C translation by Chen Laiyuan, witnessed the moment when it really gained in popularity in China. Thanks to their contributions, Judge Dee becomes a representative character in Chinese detective fiction and frequently appears in the films and TV series.

The previous researches on Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee mainly focus on plot setting and narrative characteristics, lack of the comprehensive study on its language, which is not conductive to provide the effective guidance to translators as well as common readers. And the E-C translation is worthy of intensive study, due to its concise and ingenious expression with Ming and Qing Dynasties style. However, the culture default between English and Chinese culture makes it difficult to directly translate the original version into Chinese. In order to solve the problem better, a bridge need to be built between people from different cultures and find the relevance of information based on the cognitive context. Through the shared contextual assumptions both sides of the communication can reach communicative success. Therefore, the paper takes the relevance-theoretic approach to study cultural default in the translation of The Chinese Maze Murders，one of the novels in Celebrated Judge Dee. It would provide some feasible experiences for the future translation of detective fiction.

1.2 Research Status-Quo

1.2.1 Relevant Theory and Its Application in Translation Practice

Dan Sperber systematically elaborated the Relevance Theory in his book Relevance: Communication and Cognition in 1986, explaining that communication is a process from explication to inference. Sperber and Wilson published the second edition of Relevance in 1995, which revised some concepts of relevance theory, distinguishing between communicative relevance principles and cognitive relevance principles, maximum relevance and optimal relevance. Ernst -August Gutt put forward relevance translation theory in 1991, he systematically explained this theory in his famous work Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context, arguing that it should adopt relevance theory to research translation. Diane Blakemore (2002) introduced the distinction between procedural and conceptual meanings in relevance theory when analyzing the discourse markers. Sperber and Wilson made some revisions to the definition of communicative relevance in 2004 and 2006.

A lot of Chinese scholars have also done some relevant researches. Shen Jiaxuan (1988) was the first to introduce relevance theory to China. There were a variety of researches applying relevance theory to translation field from 2007 to the present, including the research on the translation strategy of literary works and on the subtitle translation of film and television works and on the relevance as well as Relevance-theoretic Account of translation process and behavior, etc. Lin Kenan (1994) published his essay Introduction to relevance translation theory, systematically introducing the relevance translation theory of Gutt. Wangdan and Wang Xiaohong (2005) believed that relevance theory plays a strong role in explaining literature and translation. Zhuyan (2007) pointed out the translation strategy of humorous sentence based on the direct and indirect translation theory of Gutt.

1.2.2 Cultural Default and Translation Compensation Strategies