A Study On Translation Compensation Of Xu Yuanchong’s English Version Of Song Lyrics

Song lyric is the essence of Chinese traditional cultures, which contains rich cultural connotations. The translated Song lyric plays an important part in spreading the Chinese culture. However, there are always many translation losses during the translation process due to the cultural difference. And the losses occur throughout the whole translation process and exist in various aspects such as language information, meaning, culture transmission and aesthetic form, different in degree. Therefore, it is necessary and urgent to do compensation. Translation compensation means to recover or compensate the actual loss or expected loss during the process of translation.Based on Xia Tingde’s theory, this thesis analyzes the compensation techniques adopted by Xu Yuanchong in translating Song lyrics on linguistics and aesthetics level. The thesis concludes that the use of compensation can let the target readers to understand Chinese cultures better and spread traditional cultures smoothly.The research shows that the translator, Xu Yuanchong, takes compensation strategies at each level. Compensation from the linguistical level is mainly shown on the lexical level, grammatical level and discourse level. From the lexical level, the translator mainly takes the amplification, specification, generalization and annotation outside text to compensate. From the grammatical level, the translator mainly takes the adverb of time, particles, plurals and words with passive meaning to compensate. From the discourse level, the translator mainly uses the logical conjunctions and person deixis to compensate. From the aesthetic level, the translator compensates the loss from aesthetic function compensation and cultural compensation. For the aesthetic function compensation, the translator focuses on the compensation for the losses in prosody, rhetoric devices and style. For the cultural compensation, the translator mainly takes the techniques of cultural substitution, cultural transplantation and cultural annotation to compensate.