On Compensation Strategies From Catford’s Theory Of Translation Shift

Salesmanship, translated by the author of the paper, consists of one hundred and thirty thousand words. It focuses on the knowledge of sales The book is designed to teach the science of successful salesmanship and the art of selling, and compiled from the lessons and lectures written by the thirty-seven authors of the complete course. There exist many problems of micro-level in translation, which are caused by language differences between English and Chinese, and different language habits and thinking patterns, such as translation of words and phrases, and adjustment of the word order. Therefore the translator should adopt certain translation strategies.J. C. Catford came up with the "translation shift" for the first time in1965, which is further classified into two parts, level shifts and category shifts. It is aimed to explain the lack of formal correspondence between source language and target language in the process of translation. Besides, for the unavoidable translation loss, it is necessary to translate with the aid of compensation strategies in order to convey the original information as completely as possible and achieve functional equivalence. Thus the combination of translation shift and compensation is an effective way to overcome barriers caused by language differences.The paper discusses the integrating point in the theory of translation shift and the strategy of compensation through detailed introduction of Catford’s translation shift theory and compensation strategies at home and abroad. After the analysis of language differences of English and Chinese, it puts forward the corresponding compensation strategies for the translation shifts in the translation of the excerpts of the book Salesmanship. They are grammar compensation corresponding to level shifts, and shift of perspective compensation, compensation in place, compensation by merging and splitting and information compensation, corresponding to category shifts. The author hopes these translation strategies will do some help for the related theory research in the future, and provide more effective methods for English-Chinese translation.