A Report On E-C Translation Of Evolutionary Linguistics From The Perspective Of Translation Compensation Theory

The seventh chapter of Evolutionary Linguistics,written by two famous British linguists April McMahon and Robert McMahon,is selected as the source text of this translation practice,which belongs to the academic text.Published by the University of Cambridge in 2013,Evolutionary Linguistics is a textbook introducing many hypotheses and research paradigms of human language genealogy.Since the text covers representative achievements and content in the fields of linguistics,biology,neurology,genetic science,etc.,it has a typical intersection of disciplines.Meanwhile,as a professional textbook,the source text is highly professional,impartial and rigorous.The main difficulty is to deal with a large number of terminologies,long and difficult sentences and unclear logical relations of the text.In order to ensure the effective transmission of knowledge,it is necessary to adopt certain translation compensation methods to reduce translation losses and untranslatability,and to reproduce the characteristics and information of the source language as completely as possible.Under the guidance of Xia Tingde’s translation compensation theory,the writer uses specific compensation strategies to deal with the difficulties in the process of translation.For the translation of technical terminologies,the meaning of the word can be compensated by adding textual comments and footnotes as well as referring to the parallel text.For long sentences with complex grammatical structures,amplification and generalization can be used to make the meaning of the translation more clear.For long English sentences which are quite different from Chinese in syntax and expression habits,the translation can be made to the greatest extent by adjusting the word order and reorganizing the logical relationship,or by adding denotational information to compensate for translation at the discourse level.Through this translation practice,the author attempts to use translation compensation as a theoretical guide to deal with academic text which features intersection of a dozen of disciplines,and probes into the compensation at the level of terminology,semantic and discourse.It is hoped that the future translators in this field can provide reference.