On Translation Compensation

Translation is not just a transfer of languages,but also the exchange of cultures,which is an important function of translation.However,as a result of the differences between any two languages such as their structural differences,grammar differences,cultural differences and so on,translation losses are inevitably caused during the process of translation.Those differences make it hard for translators to translate from source text to target text.And translation compensation,as a helpful way to solve this problem,plays an important role in making the target texts have as much as the same effects on target readers as original texts have on original-text readers.This translation project is based on a book published in 2014 named The Birth of Korean Cool--How One Nation is Conquering the World by Pop Culture?which is written by American Korean writer and journalist Euny Hong.This project contains the introduction,Chapter 8 and Chapter 9 of the book.There is much unfamiliar information to Chinese readers in this project such as names of people,places,institutions,television programs,technical terms,figures from western books and so on.To make this unfamiliar information understandable to target readers,this author searches relevant information and then makes proper compensation to the information.In addition,there are other kinds of translation losses in the project.This author compensates them appropriately with multiple compensation techniques in order to provide readers with a good translation and a pleasing reading.This paper is based on two compensation techniques proposed by the scholar Ma Hongjun--explicit compensation and implicit compensation.The former includes intratextual annotation and extratextual annotation which consists of footnote and endnote.Implicit compensation contains many other compensation techniques such as addition,specification,generalization and paraphrasing.On the basis of the analysis of examples taken from the translation project,this author sums up four principles of compensation as follows:(a)take the purpose of the book into consideration;(b)fully understand context and read between the lines to get the intentions of the writer;(c)consider the needs of readers;(d)follow an agreed and concise rule to annotate.This author hopes this paper can be of help and provide other translators of pop-culture texts with useful suggestions.