A Report On E-C Translation Of Inseparable:the Original Siamese Twins And The Rendezvous With American History(Chapter One)

This English-Chinese translation report is based on the translation of Chapter one of Inseparable: the Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History(hereinafter referred to as Inseparable).This biography is the latest work of Chinese-American writer Yunte Huang,which recounts the complete story of Siamese Twins,famous freak-show celebrities in America.This report selects Chapter one as the source text as it digs into the connection between Siamese Twins and China.Due to the bilingual and cultural differences,translation loss is inevitable in English-Chinese translation.Guided by the Theory of Translation Compensation proposed by Professor Xia Tingde,the author of the report analyzes the types of translation losses caused in this translation project from semantic,textual and cultural dimensions.In line with the compensation principles put forward by Xia,the author summarizes corresponding compensation strategies for those translation losses at different levels.This report adopts the methodology of case analysis to analyze compensation strategies applied in the translation project,which can be classified into three aspects: 1)semantically,strategies of addition and generalization are adopted.The former is used to compensate for the loss of connotation,the loss of meaning due to grammatical differences and the loss of tone,while the latter aims to prevent the redundancy caused by information overlaps and is used to deal with figurative expression in the source text;2)textually,in terms of the loss of cohesion,the author reproduces the original logic by rearranging the information or adding logical connectives in the target text;3)culturally,three compensation strategies are applied: the strategy of annotation within text is used to compensate for the loss of information caused by cultural default,while the strategies of paraphrase and adaptation are used to remove cultural images in the source text to facilitate target readers’ understanding.Based on this translation project,the author of the report believes that Translation Compensation Theory indeed provides a feasible theoretical guidance for biography translation,guided by which,translator can identify the type of translation loss that has already happened or might happen and apply focused compensation strategies.In addition,the author of the report hopes that this report can offer some suggestions for domestic biography translation.