“Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text.” (The Oxford Companion to the English Language, Namit Bhatia, ed., 1992, pp. 1051–1054.) Translation is crucial in promoting the cultural communication, scientific development, as well as various literary styles. It should be admitted that without translation, cultures of various nations and peoples could only be appreciated in such a small scale and could not be carried forward into the world, thus making the world segregative and dissociative. It is translation that enables all unique and distinct nations of the world to broaden their vision, enrich their knowledge, renovate their values, passionate for innovation and also promote literacy. For the past several decades, great changes have taken place in China since the issue of the policy of reform and opening up. Among these changes, the most prominent one appears to be the rapid pace of the modernization drive which has resulted in the increasing need of contacts between China and the rest parts of the world in political, social, economical and cultural facades. China’s burgeoning global status requires effective translations between the English and Chinese language in order to realize cross-cultural communications in the thriving interactions between the politicians, business enterprises as well as among the ordinary people in China and other countries. The task of translating effectively, nevertheless, is rather a demanding job for the lack of knowledge in culture of the countries or specific regions. The translations between these perse cultures are considered as cultural translations which oftentimes are not accurate or precise enough so as to enrich or otherwise misinterpret the original host culture. There are abundant examples of unfaithful cultural translation, for instance, translators always risk inappropriate spill-over of source language expressions or usage into the target language translation. Besides, due to the unique existence of customs and inpidual values, there are inevitable phenomena of untranslatability in the process of both English to Chinese translation as well as Chinese to English translation. Although it is true that every piece of translated work does obtain several translating fallacies to some extent, the untranslatability should somehow be diminished to its least extent by realizing semantic assimilation between the original work and the translated version to the greatest extent. Hence, regarding the improvement of the equality of the translated literary works as the ultimate goal in the process of translation, compensation techniques, aiming at informing the readers or listeners the original meaning of the text, are illustrated in this thesis for reference.,源^自#751\文-论|文]网}www.751com.cn

This thesis is to examine the author’s profound understanding of the linguistic knowledge and cultural background of both the English language and the Chinese language. Once the thesis is done, it is a review for the author to see how well she has learned in the field of translation accompanying with her ability of synthesizing the knowledge in linguistics and discourse analysis in four years’ study as an English major. Besides, it also promotes the author’s ability not only in appreciating literary materials through the research of the topic, but also in comparing and analyzing different expressions in English and Chinese so as to dig out the connotative and semantic meanings of each expressions. In short, this thesis is of vital importance in the aspect of acknowledging how effective translation works, as well as acquiring the analytical skills through the entire process of thesis writing.

This thesis mainly discusses the phenomena of untranslatability in the process of translation and provides several compensation strategies from the angle of the Skopos theory which simply claims that the aim of translation is to produce a target text in a target setting for a target purpose and target addressees in target circumstances. (Net.1. Skopos Theory) The Skopos theory contains three principles: the skopos rule, the coherence rule, and the fidelity rule. The skopos rule focuses on translation as an activity with an aim or purpose, and on the target audience or recipient of the translation. The coherence rule claims that coherence in linguistics is what makes a text semantically meaningful, which especially deals with intra-textual coherence. The fidelity rule claims that the target text should semantically in accord with the original text and it deals with inter-textual coherence. (Net.1. Skopos Theory) Analyzing from the perspective of the Skopos theory, this thesis points out several phenomena of the loss of meaning in translation from the original text to the translated one through methods of finding literary materials and comparing examples. (Lin Wei, 2014: 3-4)  从目的论视角看英汉互译中的不可译现象及翻译补偿策略(2):http://www.751com.cn/yingyu/lunwen_51391.html