A Report On The Strategy To Compensate The Loss Of Meaning In The English-Chinese Translation Of A History Of Portugal And The Portuguese Empire (Excerpt)

How can translators compensate the loss of meaning in translating historical text? In what way will those meanings of the SL text,which are lost in the process of translation,be rendered in the TL text? Taking an English historical narrative as the source text and its Chinese translations as the target language,the report aims to answer these questions.The translation text is taken from a historical narrative entitled A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire.The SL text mainly gives us a very clear picture of the ups and downs of the Portuguese overseas empire.Characterized by its unique way of presenting facts by following a logical and objective line while limiting subjective comments,the SL text is loaded with cultural specific expressions and historically specific information,which,on one hand,comprise some important factors which help in building up the information necessary to interpret the message and on the other hand,also make it very difficult to translate.And besides,due to the differences in language structure,translation loss is inevitable.Therefore,the focus and difficulties of the translation lie in how to accurately and fully convey the hidden information of the original text to readers,and the cultural specific information in an appropriate way,so as to help the target language readers get the equivalent reaction with the source language readers.Under the guidance of translation compensation strategy,the report mainly summarizes that compensation can be conducted at two levels: in the linguistic level and the cultural level,and the former can be further divided into lexical,syntactic and discourse level.For the loss at the linguistic level,the paper summarizes five translation compensation strategies accordingly:contextual amplification,paraphrase and generalization(lexical),shift of perspective(syntactic),and logical conjunction(discourse);for the loss at the cultural level,the paper summarizes two ways of compensation: in-text and out-of-text annotations.This translation report summarizes the suitable translation compensation methods for historical texts,so as to expand the limits of translatability and provide reference and insights for other translators working on the same type of texts.