Compensation And Adaptation:A Report On The English-Chinese Translation Of Simple Tailoring And Alterations (Excerpt)

The importance of translators' subjectivity has long been neglected,especially in the translation of informative texts.Informative texts usually convey objective information,so the translation of such texts is usually expected to reproduce the original texts faithfully.However,this report proposes that informative source texts may contain multiple problems including semantic ambiguity and incompletion,requiring translators to correct and compensate for the inadequacies during the translation process to produce acceptable target texts.This report analyzes adaptation and compensation in the translation of informative texts based on the English-Chinese translation of Simple Tailoring and Alterations,a guidebook on garment alteration.The author of the book basically maintains a concise,plain and logical writing style,but the source text also features superordinate wordings,semantic incompletion,inadequate logic and insufficient explanations that compromise the quality of the target text.Thus,the translator needs to employ such strategies as adaptation and compensation to improve the target text and meet the target readers' demands.Since adaptation and compensation are both based on the understanding of the source texts,George Steiner's Fourfold Translation Motion Theory is chosen as the theoretical framework to analyze the two strategies from a hermeneutic perspective.Based on the translation of Simple Tailoring and Alterations,this report proposes two concrete methods for adaptation-specification and rectification,and three methods for compensation-compensating for semantic incompletion,compensating for inadequate logic,and compensating for inadequate explanations in the source texts.Hopefully,these methods will help other translators address similar inadequacies in informative texts and produce satisfactory target texts.Based on the translation practice,this report proposes a standard to distinguish between addition as compensation and addition as adaptation,thus drawing a clear boundary between compensation and adaptation as two translation strategies;it also suggests that adaptation includes not only creative additions to the source text,but also alterations of existing expression.More importantly,it seeks to inspire further studies of compensation and adaptation entailed by inadequacies of the source texts rather than translation losses.