Areport On E-C Translation Of Hapa Girl:A Memoir(Excerpts) From The Perspective Of Compensation Theory

This report chooses the nine chapters of May-Lee Chai’s Hapa Girl: A Memoir as her translation task to discuss how compensation theory is applied in the translation of a memoir.As a literary genre,the memoir not only recalls the life experiences of specific characters,but also expresses certain emotions,which has both literary and aesthetic values.In the translation of memoirs,how to accurately convey the information of the source text and to reproduce its artistic features is a problem that the translator needs to consider.Hapa Girl: A Memoir narrates the real life of a Chinese American family in the United States,reflecting the cultural conflicts between China and the West.As the memoir has both the features of informational text and expressive text,the source language is simple,lively,concise and forceful,which characterizes the writing style of the original author.By analysis,it is found that the possible losses in the translation of Hapa Girl: A Memoir into Chinese mainly occur on the lexical level,the semantic level,the cultural level and the aesthetic level.Accordingly,from the perspective of compensation theory,such translation techniques as paraphrase,specification,amplification,division and annotation,compensations at the four levels are explored with detailed case analysis.Through this practice,the translator realizes the important role that translation compensation plays and the significance of applying it into the literary translation practice.The translator concludes,it is necessary to compensate the losses to achieve an ideal translation and effective cross-language communication,which is also the incumbent responsibility of the translator.