A Report On The Chinese Translation Of The Every-day Life Of Abraham Lincoln（Excerpts）

The source text of this translation practice is selected from The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln by Francis Fisher Browne,an American writer and poet.As biographical literature,this book gives detailed description of Lincoln’s growth environment,life,character,work and political career.It also includes many letters and works of Lincoln himself and recollections and remarks from his relatives and friends,which helps readers understand this great man from a more objective perspective.This book features plain but vivid language.The translator chooses the first chapter and front half part of the second chapter as translation material（approximately 14,000 words in total）which mainly introduce Lincoln’s life in his childhood and youth.Translation is a cross-language communicative activity.Due to the differences between two languages,certain translation losses are inevitable in the process.Therefore,the translator adopts translation compensation theory as guidance in this translation practice to ensure the original information can be conveyed accurately and completely.Based on the careful analysis of the source text,the report discusses specific compensation strategies in this translation practice from four aspects: semantic aspect,syntactic aspect,aesthetic aspect,and cultural aspect.At the semantic level,amplification,adjustment,specification,and conversion of part of speech are used to avoid the loss of meaning caused by literal translation.At the syntactic level,division,shift of perspective and transformation of voice are adopted to increase the readability of the target text and make it more idiomatic.At the aesthetic level,compensation on sound,form and sense are discussed to narrow the aesthetic gap between two languages.At the cultural level,annotations inside and outside the target text are applied to remove cultural barriers between two languages.Through this translation practice,the translator realizes the guiding significance of translation compensation theory in biographical literature translation.By combining the elements such as linguistic features,contexts,aesthetics and cultures,the translator needs to identify the level at which the loss appears in translation and then takes proper compensation strategies to make the translation natural and fluent,helping the target language readers achieve the same or similar reading feelings as the source language readers.