The Study Of Translation Compensation And Its Application In English Translation Teaching

Translation compensation is to compensate for the loss of message, semantic meaning, pragmatic effect, cultural element, aesthetic form and its function in the process of translation. This method, used widely by translators, is always considered an effective way to bridge the gaps and then achieve the equivalence between the source language and the target language.However, the study of translation compensation is not adequate now. Although many scholars both in China and abroad have conducted plenty of studies, there is not a systematical and overall elaboration to the issue. In the pedagogical field, for one thing, the scholars always take translation compensation as a separate method; for another, the translation teachers pay much attention to the translation exercises and ignore the theoretical explanations. All the above factors prevent the further study of translation compensation in the teaching field. Therefore, on the basis of the former compensation studies and the present translation teaching in China, the author categorizes the compensation studies in the thesis and applies them into the pedagogical teaching. The purpose of the author's study is to cultivate the students'awareness to compensation, help students master proper compensation methods and finally, improve their translation ability. The author also hopes the results of the study can provide some practical implications to translation teachers.On January 6, 2008, the author conducted the pre-test among the 168 English majors from the Foreign Languages Department, Shandong Economic Management Personnel College in Jinan. The purpose is to choose an experimental class and a controlled class. Seeing that Class One and Class Three were at the same level, then, the students in the two classes, 80 in all were chosen as the subjects. Class One, 42 students in all, was designed to be the experimental class and Class Three, 38 students in all, was the controlled class. Besides, test/re-test is used as a way to testify the reliability level.The questions that the author wants to survey are:(1)whether the students have the awareness to translation loss and translation compensation.(2) to what a degree the students use the compensation methods in the linguistic aspects and cultural aspects on the E-C translation, and the causes for their errors.(3) whether the experiment carried out by the author can improve the translation teaching, and the factors causing score variation.In order to research Question (1), the author chose 10 members among the 168 English majors as the interviewees on January 9, 2008. The results show that the students have little awareness to the translation loss, especially to the language loss; most students dislike or don't get used to applying compensation methods, and they ascribe the dislike to their unfamiliarity with English and its culture. In addition, they take the mark as the absolute criterion to judge the translation ability, which prevents their awareness to translation loss and the application of compensation methods.To investigate Question (2), the author had an analysis of the results of the pre-test. Through descriptive analysis and T-value test, the pre-test reveals that the students do much better in the linguistic compensation than in the cultural aspects. The word-for-word translation to cultural words and their unfamiliarity with cultural phenomenon are two major causes for their failure in the cultural compensation; the"unnecessary translation"and"dead translation"result in errors in the linguistic compensation.In view of these unsatisfactory situations, the author applied the compensation theory to the pedagogical field and conducted a teaching experiment in the experimental class lasting for three months, from March to the end of July, 2008. The experiment was carried out by the author. The contents of the experiment include the following aspects: 1) English and Chinese comparative study; 2) translation loss; 3) some concrete compensation methods; (4) compensation principles.After three months, the post-test was conducted to investigate Question (3) on July 29, 2008. By the analysis of the test papers between the experimental class and controlled class, the author finds out that the points of both linguistic compensation and cultural compensation in the experimental class have got more improvement than in the controlled one, which shows that the experiment carried out by the author is practical and effective. In the cultural compensation, the students have adopted the sense-for-sense translation and they come to be familiar with some cultural words. Two factors above contribute to the score enhancement in this part. However, the tendency of over-compensating for cultural words appears in the post-test. In the linguistic compensation, the extent of score enhancement is much lower than in the cultural compensation. The author infers that it is the"polysem"that English has prevents students'further improvement in the"specification"part. Three months'experiment is not enough to promote their learning. Generally speaking, the points of the linguistic compensation are still much higher than the cultural ones owing to the complexity of culture.On the basis of the survey, the thesis offers some suggestions for translation teaching, which includes: cultivating students'proper attitudes towards translation; raising the students'awareness to the translation compensation by the way of English and Chinese comparative study; encouraging students to read more cultural materials to enlarge their cultural knowledge so as to"paraphrase"or"substitute"accurately in the cultural compensation; making students realize the importance of Chinese learning in order to enhance their language competence in the English- Chinese translation; teaching students the principles of compensation to avoid the over-compensation and then achieve the equivalence between the source language and the target language.