| Traditional commercial roads,as an indispensable part of the economic life in ancient Hunan,exerted extensive and far-reaching influences on the development of local economy and the spread of her regional culture.Translating the text on Hunan?s economic and historical culture can not only display the glorious history of her local business for the foreign readers to know more about Hunan,but also help strengthen the publicity and international exchange of Hunan culture.This thesis is a report based on the English translation of Hunan’s Traditional Commercial Roads(excerpts),a book of the Hunan Library series.The selected chapter consists of two parts.One is about the routes of Hunan traditional trades and their historical development,and the other is about the transportation and sales of major commodities in Hunan.As an informative text,the original text contains a large number of terms with ancient Chinese characteristics.Due to the cultural differences between Chinese and English,however,it is difficult to find the equivalent words in the target language,so is liable to cause translation losses.Translation compensation,as an effective way to make up for the losses in translation,plays an important role in this practice.Guided by the translation compensation theory proposed by Xia Tingde,the two major strategies,compensation by integration and compensation by isolation,are employed to translate the Chinese characteristic words with various methods according to different contexts.For the translation of the cultural words of economy and trade,social systems,as well as the material nouns,compensation by integration is used to ensure the information compensation and expected effect of the translation,that is,to organically integrate the compensation contents with the original text,and such methods of amplification,free translation,and specification are adopted.To use compensation by isolation by presenting the compensation contents explicitly to the target readers to make the translation fully express its cultural connotations,the ways of transliteration and annotation are applied by means of the semantic compensation of those traditional units of measurement,historical names and terms of official positions.In the report on the basis of the translation practice,the features of informative text on economic and historical cultures are expounded,and the application of those two compensation strategies—compensation by integration and compensation by isolation are analyzed in detail,with an aim to provide some experience for the translators about such similar type of texts. |
