A Report On The Chinese-English Translation Of Traditional Chinese Civilian Residences (Excerpts) From The Perspective Of Translation Compensation

Traditional Chinese Civilian Residences contributed by Yin Lixin,a well-known scholar of architectural history,it is an architectural monograph giving a detailed account of different characteristics of traditional Chinese residences and is featured with rich traditional Chinese cultural concepts.This book is rigorous in language and beautiful in diction.At the lexical level,more culture-loaded words and architectural terms are adopted;at syntactic level,more quotations from related philosophical works and run-on sentences are cited.Architecture monographs are not only highly specialized,but also contain important cultural information.Therefore,the translator must consult extensive professional literature and adopt practical translation methods in order to reproduce the beauty of culture unfolded in the source text during the transmission of the textual meaning,leaving the target text suited to the reading habits of foreign readers,and thus promoting the excellent Chinese traditional culture and architectural knowledge to the world.The translator selects the excerpt of chapter 2 as the source text for English translation,analyzes and discusses the translation methods adopted in the translation process,the translation loss problems encountered and their solutions.Based on the practice of C-E Translation of Traditional Chinese Civilian Residences,this paper analyzes the translation loss at the linguistic,aesthetic and cultural levels caused by cultural differences in the translation process from the perspective of translation compensation,and adopts the translation methods of amplification,specialization,generalization,annotation,illustration and so on to make translation compensation from the above three levels,aiming to provide strategies and inspiration for the foreign language translation of monograph series on traditional Chinese civilian residences through the English translation and research of this work,and accelerate in-depth exchanges of the architectural culture between China and abroad.This translation report is divided into five parts.The first part is task description,which briefly introduces the translation project and its significance.The second part is translation process,which mainly includes the pre-translation preparation,while-translation work and post-translation quality control.The third part is literature review,giving a summary of the relevant studies on translation compensation at home and abroad and a brief overview of the definition,principles and strategies of translation compensation proposed by Xia Tingde.The fourth part is case study.Combining with the difficulties encountered in translation practice,the translator studies the translation compensation on the basis of each typical case from three dimensions: linguistic level,aesthetic level and cultural level.At the linguistic level,the translator mainly solves the problems of lexical expressions and logical links to make the translation more faithful in linguistic expressions with adopting the compensation methods of amplification,specialization and generalization;at the esthetic level,the translator mainly analyzes compensation in terms of rhyme and form,with emphasis on the methods of rhyme reconstruction and form revivification for compensation,hoping to accurately convey the aesthetic concepts of the source text;at the cultural level,the author mainly compensates for the expression of cultural information in order to reduce the barriers brought by cultural differences,and compensation methods of annotation,footnote and illustration are adopted to intuitively explain various cultural information in the source text.And the fifth part is a conclusion,which briefly summarizes the findings and limitations of this translation practice,and then gives corresponding suggestions to address these limitations.