A Report On The C-E Translation Of Pu Songling:Sage Of Strange Stories (Excerpt) From The Perspective Of Translation Compensation Strategy

Pu Songling: Sage of Strange Stories is a literary biography,which chronologically records the life of Pu Songling.Translating his biography will be conducive to spreading his life story more widely,as well as his great works and personal charm as a Chinese writer.Through translating this biography into English,the author encounters five categories of translation difficulties,which are classified as follows: culture-loaded words,fourcharacter expressions,names of roads,rivers,hills,books,and people,classical Chinese,and verse lines,which cannot be translated literally by avoiding losses of source language and culture.Based on the characteristics of literary biography text and language features of Chinese and English,the author employs compensation strategies to compensate for language and cultural losses in the translation process.Applications of comprehensive compensation strategies at the linguistic and aesthetic levels have produced tangible effects on the target text in terms of readability,faithfulness,and communicativeness.At the same time,by extracting experiences from practices,the author outlines three compensation principles,that is,compensation applicability,compensation position,and compensation limits.Moreover,the author offers a study perspective on reader compensation expectations for upcoming compensation strategy research.