Loss And Compensation

Starting with a brief discussion of the paradoxical nature of translation, this thesis examines the loss phenomenon in translation. The aim of translation is to transfer a text from one language to another, but informational, stylistic, aesthetic and cultural loss occurs all time, in all places. Conscientious and competent translators always strive to achieve perfection, but very often they end up resigned to their imperfect destiny and persuade themselves to enjoy their partial success and live with all kinds of imperfection, of which the so-called translational loss makes up a major part. Loss is inevitable in translation because of the very nature of translation, which is a paradox: The purpose of translation is to introduce new, foreign, alien "stuff", but on the other hand, both the vehicle for conveying this foreign stuff, the target language, and the receptor of this foreign stuff, the intended reader of the translated version, are both already a self-contained system that are likely to "resist the invading foreign object". What translators can do is to reconcile the contradictory parties: to manipulate and make the alien, foreign stuff less foreign, less alien and at the same time "tamper with" both the target language and the target reader to "break them in", that is, to make them "expect surprises."The paper consists of six chapters. The first chapter gives a brief introduction. In the second chapter, an evaluation is made on the arguments about loss in translation, which have gained wide circulation and acceptability in modern translation theory.The third chapter discusses Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, a masterpiece of the stream of consciousness, a very "literary" piece of literature containing all kinds of "peculiarities" that are peculiar to the Western world, to American, to the South of America, to the first few decades of the 20^th century, and to the author himself. In a word, it is a very challenging work to its translator. All kinds of difficulties must have occurred. So it is a good choice for a case study about translational loss.In the fourth part the case study is done. A comparison is made between the original text and the translation. Then phonetic, morphological, lexical, syntactic, textual, and cultural losses are discussed, and the strategies used to deal with the losses are examined. In the fifth chapter ways of compensation are explored.Based on foregoing exploration, the sixth chapter draws a brief conclusion about translational loss and its compensation.