Compensation technique

One more specific transformation which may come handy to the translator when he is baffled by an apparently unsolvable translation is called the compensation technique.

Compensation technique is a deliberate introduction of some additional elements in translation to make up for the loss of similar elements at the same or an earlier stage.

It’s resorted to when a translator deals with equivalent lacking elements.

What are the elements having no precise equivalent in the TL and which can’t be rendered by the same means? They are:

1). The speech of foreigners and dialects;

2). Individual peculiarities of speech;

3). Diminutive and augmentative usages;

4). Equivalent-lacking grammatical categories;

5). Different stylistic figures (play upon words, metaphors, periphrases, irony etc.).

A translator must be ready to render the speech of foreigners, dialect forms and illiterate speech in the TL forms. It goes without saying that one can hardly render, say, cockney dialect using the Western Ukrainian dialect forms. There is no universal recipe for this translation problem and each such case requires an individual approach.

In some cases contaminated forms (the distortions in the target grammar and phonetics) are used to imitate the speech of foreigners. Sometimes both SL and TL have developed accepted forms of representing the contaminated speech by persons of foreign origin. For example, the speech of a Chinese can be represented in English and in Ukrainian in a conventional way, which facilitates the translator's task:

E.g.: Me blingee beer. Now you pay.

– Моя плинесла пиво. Твоя типель платити.

If no such tradition exists, the translator has to select some possible contaminated Ukrainian forms to produce the desired effect:

E.g.: When you see him quid’ then you quick see him ‘perm whale’ – (the speech of a Kanaka)

Коли твоя бачив спрут, тоді твоя скоро-скоро бачив кашалот.

It is not always necessary to give the contaminated forms of each word in a TL utterance. It may be sufficient to indicate the speech of a foreigner with the help of a few deliberate distortions of grammatical or phonetic norms. Much depends here on the pragmatic intent of the original utterance.

The individual peculiarities of speech.

The woman character of the story “Arrangement in Black and White” by D.Parker often speaks incorrect English. Her highly emotional speech abounds in wrong forms of some words.

E.g.: “Oh, I’m finely”, she said. “Just simply finely. Listen. I want you to do me the most terrible favor. Will you? Will you please? Pretty please?”

“О, в мене все красненько”, відповіла вона. “Просто-таки красненько. Послухайте, я хочу, щоб ви мені зробили страшенну послугу. Зробите? Будь ласка, зробите? Дуже вас прошу”.

The wrong use of “finely” instead of the correct form “fine” is not easy to translate into Ukrainian where there is no corresponding corrupted form of this word. Hence, the stylistically wrong employment of the adverb “красненько” with the aim of compensating the corruption in Ukrainian translation.

Diminutives have a very poor representation in English (only some nouns) but there is a very large quantity of them in Ukrainian, where they exist practically among all parts of speech. Cf: English: dear – dearie; stream – streamlet;

Ukrainian: -есеньк, -оньк; -очок (лебідонька, малесенький, питоньки).

In English they may be used only as diminutives or they may express diminutive evaluation as well, which is identified in context.

It is difficult to say, for example, whether booklet, manikin or hillock are diminutives only or diminutives and evaluatives at the same time. As diminutives they mean брошюра, карлик and горбок respectively, and as diminutive evaluatives they may express the meanings of книжечка/ брошурка, чоловічок (small and handsome), горбочок (not high and pleasant hillock).

This distinction is almost always clearly identified and expressed in Ukrainian where diminutive suffixes may also point to an escalating gradation of a diminutive quality of a noun: дівчина; дівчинка; дівча; дівчатко; дівчаточко; дівонька; дівчинонька.

Similar meanings have to be expressed in English with the help of lexico-syntactic means, i.e. by means of some additional adjectives containing the seme of smallness: голівка – (small) little head; дівчинонька – dear/ lovely girl; рученята – tiny hands or in some other way:

E.g.: Господи, синочки, йдіть мерщій (О.Довженко “Мати”)

Lordy, in with you quick.

Neither has the English language any morphological means to express explicitly the augmentative and evaluative meanings of Ukrainian lexemes (mostly nouns). As a result, they acquire in English an objectively predetermined form of explicit expression by means of word-groups or sentences. For example, the pejorative (mostly contemptuous) meanings of a number of Ukrainian augmentative nouns will have the following English outer form expression:

вовчище – a big formidable wolf/ a big monster of a wolf;

дубище – a very thick and tall/ ramous oak-tree;

здоровило – a healthy/ robust fellow; a regular/ robust maypole;

п’янюга – a miserable heavy drunkard; a disgusting inebriate; a three-bottle man.

Stylistic devices:

The problem of translation faithfulness is closely connected with the stylistic aspect of translation – one cannot reach the required level of faithfulness if the stylistic peculiarities of the ST are neglected.

Among the existing stylistic figures a pun (play on words) is righteously considered the most difficult for translation.

Play upon words (pun) must be duly reproduced in TL otherwise its translation will be unintelligible. This is the dominant goal which should be achieved at all costs even though it might involve some inaccuracies in the translation of other elements.

If the SL word played upon has a Ukrainian substitute which can also be used both literally and figuratively, a word for word translation is possible:

E.g.1: Whenever a young gentleman was taken in hand by doctor Blimber, he might consider himself sure of a pretty tight squeeze.

Коли лікар (Блімбер) брав у руки якого-небудь джентельмена, той міг бути впевненим, що його як слід стиснуть.

In other cases the translator tries to find in TL another word that can be played upon in a similar way.

Another SD is periphrasis. Its frequent use is characteristic of the English language. Some of the periphrases are borrowed from classical sources (myths and the Bible); others are typically English. (??? To give an example, the periphrases of the classical origin are “Beware Greeks…”, “Prodigal son” (“Бійтесь данайців…”, “Блудний син”) whereas “Lake Country…” (“Озерна країна”) is a typically English periphrasis). As a rule periphrases do not present difficulties for translation, however, their correct translation strongly depends on situation and appropriate background information.

Special attention is to be paid by a translator to overt and covert quotations. The former require only correct rendering of the source quotation in the TL and the main requirement here is the following – !!! never suggest your own homemade translation for a quotation. The latter (covert quotations) take the shape of an allusion and the pragmatic equivalence seems the most appropriate for the case. For example, “the Trojan horse raid” one may translate as напад, підступний, як кінь троянців (i.e. preserving the allusion) or as підступний напад (losing the meaning of the original quotation).