A Study Of Foregrounding Theory And Compensatory Strategies In Literary Translation

This thesis aims to explore how compensatory strategies are used to make up for meaning losses that may occur when foregrounded linguistic features of literary texts are rendered. The author chooses To Play the King as the source text for translation with commentary because it contains a lot of foregrounded language, which is an important feature of this novel and which poses a great challenge to translators as to how to retain it in the translation. The thesis reports how the author tried to respond to the challenge under the guidance of the compensation theory in completing the translation project.The first part of the thesis gives a brief introduction to the research background, defines the concept of foregrounding and compensation, and explains the necessity and significance of compensation in literary translation, pointing out that meaning losses exist since the very beginning of translation because of linguistic and cultural differences between the source and target language. Now that there are meaning losses, compensation is necessary. Compensatory procedures can be used to make up for meaning losses, especially losses of prominent semantic meanings, syntactic meanings, and pragmatic meanings (which constitute the foregrounded linguistic features of literary texts).The second part of the thesis analyses foregrounded linguistic features in To Play the King. Examples are given to illustrate how the author applied compensation in translating To Play the King with a detailed explanation of how compensatory procedures such as annotation, paraphrase, adaptation and contextual amplification helped to make up for the otherwise inevitable loss of prominent semantic meanings, syntactic meanings and pragmatic meanings of the original in the translation.The final part of the thesis presents the conclusion that compensation provides an effective means to minimize the loss of meanings in translating foregrounded linguistic features and to improve translation quality. In the process of translation, compensatory strategies should be applied in a flexible way. None of compensatory strategies are superior to any other. The translator need to get the gist of the source text and choose the most appropriate compensatory strategies to compensate for the losses of prominent meanings, making sure that the most significant meaning is rendered first.