On The Classification And Strategies Of C-E Translation Compensation

As a bridge in the exchange of Chinese and Western cultures, translation playsan important role. However, could translators really transform information, meanings,pragmatic functions, aesthetic forms and so on to target language readers in spite ofthe differences in cultural background and ways of thinking from different nations?Macroscopically, people are common in physical linguistics and psychologicalmechanisms, ecological environment and experience and language function, whichmakes it possible for the inter-language and inter-cultural translation. But translationis microcosmic limited. There exists loss in the whole translating process, which evenstarts from the first step of analyzing source texts. That makes compensation in need.Translation compensation is a theory being used to compensate translation loss,improving translatability and presenting information, meanings, pragmatic functions,aesthetic forms of original language to the target language readers on the largest scale.That is to say, translation compensation could optimize translation effects.Xia Tingde defines translation compensation as a theory used to compensatetranslation loss with strategies, basing on text-types and translation purpose. Broughtinto China in1980s, it is still far behind other translation theories. Though, it developsrapidly these years, early scholars mainly focus on the study of translation loss due tocultural differences and its specific strategies. However, the construction of thetheoretical framwork is inadequate, including that of classification.From the perspective of character of translation loss, we can classify translationcompensation into five categories: cultural compensation, grammatical compensation,aesthetic compensation, semantical compensation and pragmatical compensation.Cultural compensation always embodies cultural gap and differences. Among all ofcompensation strategies, paraphrase and transliteration with annotation as asupplement are given priority to compensate cultural translation loss; for thegrammatical translation loss, it is mainly reflected in number, case, aspect, tense and voice between Chinese and English. Then it is necessary to apply amplification to addlexicon to compensate the loss; compensation of aesthetic will be analyzed fromprosody, rhetoric device. For this kind of translation loss, translators could make useof features of Chinese and English and put isomorphism into use; semantic lossincludes conceptual meaning gap, and associative meaning differences. We can adoptstrategies such as interpretation, substitution and annotation; the translation loss ofpragmatics mainly embodies in conversational implicature and the illocutionary act.In order to re-create a similar effect in the target text, domestication is neededaccording to different contexts.To sum up, by analyzing the classification and strategies of translationcompensation, it benefits improving translation ability of translators and diversifiesthe study of translation theory.