ABSTRACT
In Chapter 3, we said it may be necessary to palliate certain TT effects by using compensation. To see what is meant by this, we can return to the meddling neighbour (p. 37). One way of translating the proverb was: ‘Remember the saying: “Water asleep is water too deep”.’ ‘Remember the saying’ is added to show that the aphorism is an established proverb and not a flight of poetic creativeness on the part of the neighbour. Without the addition, the unfamiliarity of the pseudo-calque would have an exotic quality that is completely absent from the ST, and it would also imply something about the neighbour's personality that the ST does not imply at all. Depending on the purpose of the TT, these two effects could be instances of serious translation loss, a significant betrayal of the ST effects. Adding ‘Remember the saying’ does not make ‘water asleep is water too deep’ any less unfamiliar in itself, but it does make it less likely to have these misleading effects. And giving it a quasi-proverbial style preserves the sententious tone, which would be lost in a literal translation.
