The Application Of Compensation In The Translation Of Travel Texts Based On Functional Equivalence

This thesis is a report on translation practice.The translation excerpt is taken from the eighth chapter of Adriatic,a book written by the American geopolitical scientist Robert D.Kaplan,which mainly introduces the author’s travel in the Adriatic countries at the end of the last century.The eighth chapter mainly introduces the author’s travel in Corfu,an island of Greece.Along the way,the author offers opinions and comments on the cultures,traditions,cuisine,history,literature,arts,landscapes and architectures of the places he visited.The absence of semantic relations caused by cultural differences is an inescapable problem in cross-cultural communications.As the envoy of cross-cultural communications,translators are bound to face such problems and have the responsibility to deal with them as much as necessary.The translation material of the report can be regarded as a special kind of literary work.Due to the cultural differences between the source text and the target text,readers are inevitably encountering difficulties in understanding the text if the translator fails to deal with the problem of cultural default properly.Thus,to reduce translation loss in information,meaning,pragmatic function and cultural factors in the original literary work,translators are required to adopt various translation compensation strategies and methods.Therefore,the report analyzes the problems in the English-Chinese translation of Adriatic and comes up with certain solutions under the guidance of compensation theory.Given the existence of a large number of professional knowledge barriers and terms in the translation of this geopolitical travel text,translation compensation is particularly important,especially because there are a large number of allusions,terms,and references in the original text.This report is divided into five chapters:The first chapter focuses on the translation task,including the introduction to the text source,author,content,and text type,and puts forward the main issues discussed in this report:in the process of translation of travelogue texts,how should translators effectively and reasonably compensate from the perspective of functional equivalence?The second chapter introduces the translation process,including preparation before translation,operation,and revision.The third chapter introduces functional translation theory,which is used to analyze the Chinese version,and translation compensation and its research status are also discussed.The fourth chapter,from the perspective of functional equivalence theory,analyzes Chinese translation from three aspects:lexical,grammatical,and cultural level.Each example is followed by a description of the specific translation methods.The fifth chapter summarizes the content of this report and points out that functional equivalence theory can serve as a guiding principle on translation compensation.This part also puts forward some specific suggestions for translating the travelogue.It is hoped that this report could be of some help to readers interested in geopolitical writings and future translators handling similar texts.