A Report On E-C Translation Of Kingdom Of Characters (Excerpt From Chapter Seven) From The Perspective Of Translation Compensation Theory

The material the author selects for her translation is from the seventh chapter in the work of nonfiction named Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern by Jing Tsu of Yale University.The chosen part accounts for two thirds of the chapter and covers the digitalization of the Chinese script with a focus on historic events and key figures.Since culture always grows in step with technology,it is of great significance to China,a future culturally advanced country,to figure out how the characters are made pressed into service for modern technologies successfully so as to facilitate communication between different cultures.The translation can inform the reader with facts in relation to the digitalization of Chinese and raise public awareness of technology’s great power to enable the script a global role more commensurate with China’s own.In addition,how the information is organized and arranged in the source text,a demonstration of the writer’s human narration,may serve as a good reference for those who are prepared to tell stories about China’s struggles for being a modern country nationwide.When translating the source text,the author has some difficulty in determining proper meanings of unique phrases,in ensuring semantic integrity and idiomatic expression of long sentences,and in recreating the original stylistic features.As a result,losses are caused in her translation.To address them,the author,under the guidance of Xia Tingde’s translation compensation theory,analyzes the translation losses one by one and uses appropriate translation techniques to make compensation.For translation loss at the linguistic level,such translation techniques can be employed to make up for the loss of lexical meaning as amplification,paraphrase,specification and generalization,and annotation outside text,while amplification,conversion and division are three useful techniques to make grammatical compensation for translation losses of long sentences and passive sentences.For translation loss at the aesthetic level,the author replaces the original aesthetic form with a new one in the target text in order to have the aesthetic function retained,or she conveys the original information by removing the aesthetic form and then the aesthetic value can be reproduced in the target text.After analyzing specific translation examples,the author closes the report by drawing some conclusions.It is a translator’s primary concern to make his or her translation meet target language readers’ reading anticipation when he or she is tasked with translating a text which is informative and partly expressive.To have his or her task completed,the translator needs to convey faithfully the original information to target readers and has the original style of the text reproduced by reducing any translation loss through the clever use of compensation strategies.The author hopes that this report can be a reference material for the technologization of Chinese and inspire the future nonfiction translation practice.