The Translation Of Economic Texts In The Light Of Translation Compensation Theory

The source text of this translation is selected from a survey report titled Women,Business and the Law 2021 published by the World Bank.The World Bank has conducted a series of surveys on the economic impact of gender discrimination,and this one is the seventh version in the series.The survey,which is divided into three chapters,introduces the findings of the World Bank and focuses on the impact of the pandemic on women’s employment,health and safety.It also makes certain exploration and innovation in the two new areas of childcare and access to justice.Chapter One and parts of Chapter Two of the survey are selected as the source text of the translation,based on which the present report is completed.Since the selected material is an economic text with strong logicality and it involves the concepts and terms in the area of labor law and protection of women’s rights,the present author employs the compensation theory to guide this translation practice.The compensation theory holds that loss is inevitable in the translation process and the causes of the loss are various;thus,translators should make use of linguistic devices of the target language to compensate the deviation or loss in the translation process,depending on the types of text and the purposes of the translation.Ke Ping proposes eight compensation strategies,namely,annotation,amplification,shift of perspective,specification,generalization,paraphrase,adaptation,and back translation.Xia Tingde divides the translation compensation into three levels,namely,linguistic compensation,discourse compensation,and aesthetic compensation.In this report,a theoretical framework is constructed by the combination of the compensation strategies proposed by Ke Ping and Xia Tingde.At the level of lexical compensation,the present author employs lexical devices,such as annotation outside text,amplification and paraphrase,to provide target readers with information that is required to understand the source texts.Among them,the strategy of paraphrase is mainly used to transfer the difficult collocations in the source texts,making the translation more natural and fluent.As for the information loss due to different social cultures,the strategy of annotation outside text is employed.The present author also refers to Xia Tingde’s compensation strategy at discourse level and employs his method of adding connectives to deal with the problem of logical conjunction,making the implicit relations explicit in the translation.It is found that in the translation of economic texts,such methods as annotation outside text,amplification and paraphrase are helpful in representing the message of the source text by explaining various policies in economies and relevant concepts in the labor market to target readers.The strategy of paraphrase can also be adopted in conveying those lexical collocations in the source text which are difficult to translate literally.To adapt to the reading habits of the target language readers,the method of adding connectives can be adopted to make implicit logical relation explicit and produce a more fluent translation.