Semantic Reproduction In Chinese Translation Of Historical Texts From The Perspective Of Translation Compensation Theory

Translation compensation refers to a remedial method adopted in the translation process for the unavoidable default of information.A good translation compensation in the translation text can better improve the quality of the translation and realize the semantic reproduction.As an informative text,the language of historical texts is objective,formal,rigorous and involves a lot of cultural background knowledge,while the semantic default information of such texts is expressed more often.The translation of some chapters in the book Commerce reports,an informational text published by the U.S.Department of Commerce,is selected as the object of study in this report.The report explores the problem of semantic omission in the process of Chinese translation of historical texts and its solutions under the perspective of translation compensation theory.After the translation and in-depth analysis of the text,the problems in the consulate report can be summarized as follows: first,the syntactic structure differences cause semantic omissions,including superposition of parallelism and complex nested relationships;second,the semantic information in the original text is implicit,including the implicit logical relationship in long sentences and the unspecified actor in passive sentences;third,the historical proper nouns are complicated,including a large number of historical place names and historical names of people.Fourth,cultural omissions are frequent,including the lack of corresponding meanings of culturally loaded words and the use of common nouns to refer to historical events.After an in-depth analysis of the typical example sentences in the text,specific solutions are proposed for the problems arising in the translation process;dissolution compensation and split-translation recombination compensation are proposed as solutions for the semantic default caused by syntactic structure differences;logical explicit compensation and information compensation are proposed as solutions for the implicit semantic information of the original text;in-text annotation compensation and out-text annotation compensation are proposed as solutions for the complicated historical proper nouns;naturalization compensation and under-text annotation compensation are proposed as solutions for the frequent occurrence of cultural default.The solution is to compensate for cultural omissions.The semantic default problems and the corresponding solutions summarized in this practice report are derived from this translation practice,and we hope to provide some reference for dealing with semantic default problems in translations of academic texts or other texts in the future.