A Practice Report On Semantic Compensation In The English Translation Of Pingyao Ancient City (excerpt) From The Perspective Of Translation Compensation

Chinese traditional culture has been widely known to the world as the national strength constantly grows.Shanxi,located at the central China,is the original place of the famous Shanxi merchants and also has the outstanding regional culture.Based on semantic compensation theories,this report gives an analysis to the application of semantic compensation tactics in the English translation of the Chinese culture theme textbook Pingyao Ancient City(Excerpt),aiming at expressing the traditional Chinese culture and Shanxi merchants culture involved in the textbook in an accurate and expressive attempt.Having both the informative text and the expressive text,the source text in the translation project is a selection of 3 chapters from Pingyao Ancient City that cover history,legend stories and sights of the ancient city,which include a large number of cultural information.However,as a result of the wide differences between China and the west in the aspects of languages and cultures,problems occur regarding the concepts default of characteristic vocabulary,the grammatical inconformity between Chinese and English and the indistinct expression of the semantic logic that likely lead to confusion and difficulties in comprehending and translating the source text.Therefore,with respect to the problems drawn from the translating practices,the report discusses nine practical tactics of semantic compensation applied in the English translation of Chinese culture text,including intratextual annotation,extratextual annotation,back translation of the third language,transform of the sentence with no subject,alteration of the grammatical form,logical conjunction addition,paraphrase,contextual amplification and omission and specification and generalization.Through a good deal of case analysis and tactic applications,it's proved that to a certain extent,semantic compensation works in the English translation of Chinese cultural text with its guiding and practical value.