A Practice Report On E-C Translation From The Perspective Of Compensation Theory

As a bridge of intercultural communication,translation is an interlingual conversion between two languages that have different construction methods and carry different cultural connotations.In translating practice of linguistic character and cultural transformation,translation losses are inevitably incurred.When a word or sentence defies direct rendering,the translator needs to use other means to make up for the distortion and defect in the target language,hence the translation compensation.In order to ensure that the textual information,cultural connotation,aesthetic form,language function and the pragmatic function of the source language could be conveyed completely and accurately,compensation is the necessary measure for the translator to exert his maximum subjective initiation.However,it is not difficult to find out that the modern translation compensation research was gradually developed on the basis of modern linguistics and the related disciplines in the second half of the last century,and entered the perspective of translation study.After several generations of translation researchers,translation compensation research is increasingly systematic.But compared with other translation theories,translation compensation theory has not yet reached a perfect stage.The gorgeous culture and brilliant economic achievements of the Tang Dynasty have influenced China,the East and even the world for more than a thousand years.This report is built on Splendors of a Golden Era in China: The Culture and Arts of the Tang Dynasty which is one of the recommended books of the 2014 Boao Forum for Asia.In this book,the writer Dong Changjun outlines the open and inclusive great dynasty in Chinese history from a unique perspective.The book comprehensively introduces the Tang Dynasty's politics and economy systems,culture and art achievements.It outlines the marvelous achievements of the Tang Dynasty through detailed historical data,not only unrolling a beautiful picture of far-reaching political and economic system and colorful culture and art,but also displaying the history of Tang Dynasty's prosperity with its magnificent perspective.Generally speaking,the language employed in the book is plain,logical and clear.At the lexical level,the words are exquisite,the transliteration words are frequent found,and terms are in abundance;at the syntactic level,the expressions are more rigorous and complex,which is a challenge to the translator who attempts to complete the translation practicewith the guidance of translation compensation theory,and studies the translation compensation strategy from the linguistic and aesthetic levels according to Xia Tingde and Ma Hongjun's translation compensation theories.In addition,because the corpus involves lots of Chinese traditional cultural knowledge,translation compensation at the cultural level is also included in the study.Through the exploration and discussion of different levels of translation loss and the corresponding compensation strategies,this study draws the following conclusion: First,translation losses are inevitable in translation practice.Untranslatability may exist,but translation could always be compensated.Translation compensation is necessary and it is also conceivable.Second,at the linguistic level,compensation methods such as amplification,specification and generalization are mainly adopted for translation compensation;cultural defaults are compensated by footnotes,endnotes,and graphic illustrations;on the aesthetic level,conversion method is mainly used as compensation strategy.Third,in the popular cultural texts like this corpus,the linguistic level of compensation is used most frequently,followed by cultural compensation,and the aesthetic compensation is relatively less used.Translation compensation is a category which is worthy of further study.Under the guidance of translation compensation theory,the author constantly explores and improves the quality of translation through the use of various compensation strategies in the hope that this translation practice could contribute to the compensation research,and attract more translation researchers to pay closer heed to the translation compensation phenomenon.Thus the translation compensation theory could be improved,and the research in this field be pushed into a broader space.