A Report On The English Translation Of Praise Of Spring:Sanyuesan Singing Festival Of The Zhuang People(Excerpts)

Culture going-out strategy makes cultural publicity one of the most highlighted topics in the development of Chinese culture in recent years.Meanwhile,the translation of minority culture has ushered in favorable opportunities.The original text is selected from the last two chapters of Prise of Spring: Sanyuesan Singing Festival of the Zhuang People by Professor Li Fuqiang,a pioneer of Zhuang study.This book is a perfect text to promote the culture with the Zhuang’s characteristics for its rich and vivid narration of the origin of the Sanyuesan Festival,numerous legends about customs and diets as well as the inheritance of this festival.Differences in culture,language and thinking inevitably result in translation loss in different levels.Therefore,translation compensation is an essential means to ensure that the original information can be conveyed completely.Guided by the translation compensation,this report illustrates specific compensation strategies in the folklore translation from semantic compensation,syntactic compensation,cultural compensation and aesthetic compensation based on the analysis of text type and linguistic features.At the semantic level,contextual amplification,shift of perspective and generalization are used to reduce redundant information and clarify semantic information so as to avoid meaning loss caused by literal translation.At the syntactic level,division and conversion are adopted to avoid confusing sentence patterns,comprehension deficits and translationese.Intratextual compensation and extratextual compensation are applied to annotate,substitute and add cultural information in the source text at cultural level.Aesthetic compensation mainly involves figures of speech.The author takes two compensation methods to restore aesthetic forms and values of the source text,such as re-creating end rhymes and adopting adaptation.This report aims to analyze the significance of translation compensation in this folklore translation through the author’s own translation practice.It is hoped that more translators can explore and do further research on translation compensation.Meanwhile,it is expected that this report can provide reference for the translation of similar texts.