A Report On Translating Mo Yan's Short Stories (Excerpts) Based On Compensation Strategy

Mo Yan is the first Chinese writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.In recent years,his works have attracted the attention of Chinese and foreign literature lovers.More and more works have been translated into different languages.However,most translators focus on his long novels,but less on short stories.On the other hand,the creation of short stories can be regarded as the starting point of his literary creation.Paying attention to the language in Mo Yan's short stories helps to translate Mo Yan's short stories into English better.Because there exist differences between Chinese culture and Western culture,translating Mo Yan's short stories would cause losses of culture factors.This report is to spread Chinese culture and make more people know Mo Yan's work,so the writer adopts compensation strategy to compensate.The translation material in this report is the four novels of the Mo Yan short story collection A Date with the Master.They are A beauty as White as Ice,Good Doctors,A Leprosy Son and The Daughter of Butcher.In translation process,the writer uses compensation strategy at lexical level,syntactic level and discourse level.However,the writer takes culture-loaded words as an example in the report.The writer takes Liao Qiyi's definition of culture-loaded words as the basis for judging cultural words.Liao(2000: 232)defines culture-loaded words as �words,phrases,idioms,and allusions that signify a particular thing in a culture�.According to Nida's(1993)classification of culture,the writer divides culture-loaded words into five categories.They are religious,material,ecological,social,and linguistic culture-loaded words.The writer uses Xia Tingde's(1991)and Ke Ping's(2006)definitions of compensation strategy as the theoretical basis.This report shows the author's compensation strategy for culture-loaded words in a quantitative way.Taking the literal translation as the reference text,the writer compensates the loss of referential meaning and associative meaning in the process of translating culture-loaded words literally in Mo Yan's short stories.The reference meaning and the associative meaning are same.These words carry the same thought between China and Western or the goods also have existedin Western countries,or the proper nouns that have been translated to western countries early,the writer adopted literal translation or idiomatic translation;The reference meaning is same while the associative meaning is different,this kind of culture-loaded words usually have implied meaning;The reference meaning and the associative meaning are different,these words are usually synonyms of thoughts or goods that are unique to China.The corresponding translation methods are adopted,which include amplification,literal translation with annotation,transliteration with annotation,paraphrase,and liberal translation with annotation.In the process of translating culture-loaded words,the writer needs considering the features of words,cultural thoughts of the words and the context that words are in.Adopting a compensation strategy can make up for the losses caused by cultural differences and can make the translations read more smoothly.The writer hopes that the translation methods in this report will help readers to have a deep understanding of the translation methods of Mo Yan's short stories and will benefit the future translation activities.