ABSTRACT
In Chapter 3, we spoke of the need to palliate certain TT effects by the use of compensation. To see what is meant by this, we can return to Gianluca and the teacher (pp. 30-1). One way of translating the proverb was ‘You know the saying: “He who sleeps catches no fish”.’ ‘You know 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 teacher. Without the addition, the quaint unfamiliarity of the calque would have an exotic quality that is completely absent from the ST, and it would also imply something about the teacher’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 ‘You know the saying’ does not make ‘He who sleeps catches no fish’ any less unfamiliar in itself, but it does make it less likely to have these misleading effects. This procedure is a good example of compensation: that is, where any conventional translation (whether literal or otherwise) would entail an unacceptable translation loss, this loss is reduced by the freely chosen introduction of a less unacceptable one, such that important ST effects are rendered approximately in the TT by means other than those used in the ST. Thus, in this example, adding ‘You know the saying’ incurs great translation loss in terms of economy and cultural presupposition, but this is accepted because it significantly reduces an even greater loss in terms of message content.
