A Research On Compensation Theory In Literary Translation

The source text of this translation practice report,entitled Them Old Cowboy Songs,is taken from one of the Wyoming Trilogy Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3 written by the well-known contemporary American novelist Annie Proulx(1935-).By portraying a young cowboy couple who had much hardship on their journey of pioneering and confronted a miserable ending,the story reflects a social landscape interwoven with pioneering aspiration and death in the American westward civilization in the second half of the nineteenth century.The story is clear and concise in wording and simple in syntax,but noticeably it is characterized by its richness in colloquial expressions,unique cowboy songs,and various figures of speech,which highlight the aesthetic style of the story.The translation material of the thesis is a typical literary work,which inevitably leads to loss in the process of its translation.In order to reduce translation loss in information,meaning,pragmatic function,aesthetic forms,and cultural factors in the original literary work,translators are required to adopt various translation compensation strategies and methods.Therefore,the thesis analyzes the problems in the English-Chinese translation of Them Old Cowboy Songs and comes up with solutions under the guidance of compensation theory.The thesis discusses linguistic compensation and aesthetic compensation in literary translation through analyzing the linguistic features and aesthetic forms of the source text with specific examples and figuring out compensation methods to solve the problems in the linguistic aspect and the aesthetic aspect.The analysis of linguistic compensation can be further divided into compensation at the lexical level and grammatical level.Accordingly,the following seven compensation methods can be adopted to compensate translation loss in different aspects in literary translation: specification,generalization,amplification,supplement of adverbs of time,supplement of words with plural meanings,voice transformation,and explicitation of personal nouns.Then the target readers obtain the same or similar effects as the source readers does.In addition,the rhythmic cowboy songs,the rough or non-systematic Wyoming vernacular,and the vivid figures of speech are three unique aesthetic forms of the short story.The author takes the other six compensation methods to restore aesthetic forms and values of the source text,such as repetition,parallel structure,dialect blending,malapropism,annotation,and adaptation.Finally,through the theoretical explanations and translation practice analyses,the thesis comes to a conclusion: translators should attach importance to the inevitability of translation loss in literary translation as well as the necessity of translation compensation,and should adopt various translation compensation methods to restore as much as possible the linguistic and aesthetic effects of the original works.