A Practice Report On E-C Translation Of Breathe:A Life In Flow (Excerpts) From The Perspective Of Translation Compensation Theory

This paper is a translation report,which reports the difficulties and solutions encountered by the author in translating Breathe: A Life in Flow(Foreword,Chapter 1 and 2).Breathe: A Life in Flow is a memoir which is characterized by both informative and expressive text.It was published in 2021 by Harper Collins Publishers,with more than 60 thousand words.This book is the latest bestseller of Amazon,and there is no Chinese version yet.It was written by Rickson Gracie with the help of Peter Maguire.Rickson Gracie is a world-famous Jiu Jitsu master,who has kept a record of 400 consecutive victories.This book mainly narrates the career of Rickson Gracie,the rise and fall of The Gracie clan and the establishment of Ultimate Fighting Championship.English,as an inflectional language,has the changes of tense and number,while Chinese does not.As a cultural carrier,language is embodiment of different cultures,and there exist huge differences between English and Chinese cultures.Besides,the aesthetic forms of China and the West are also different.What is mentioned above leads to the loss of translation in semantics,culture and aesthetics.Translation compensation theory holds that translation loss is an unavoidable problem in the process of translation.Therefore,compensation is very essential to ensure that the original information,meaning,pragmatic functions,cultural elements,aesthetic forms and other elements are completely conveyed in translation.This paper adopts translation compensation theory to analyze the translation process,mainly at semantic,cultural and rhetorical levels,adopting corresponding strategies to make compensation.First of all,the techniques of amplification,extension and specification are adopted to make compensation for semantic losses.Secondly,the strategy of annotation within text and annotation outside text are adopted to compensate for the cultural losses.Finally,at the rhetorical level,techniques like the use of four-character words,repetition and parallelism are adopted to compensate for the language style.