Compensation Principles in Literary Translation : With Korean Translation of Su Tong's Short Story as an Example

Abstract

Literary translation is an artistic and cultural shift between two languages. The cultural differences between the two languages involved in the translation determine irreversibility of literary translation. Since literary translation has distinct characteristics, and more artistic and aesthetic values than other types of translation, it tends to entail a great deal of losses in the process translation. So, there needs to be appropriate compensation for such losses in order to reduce the gap that stems from the cultural and aesthetic differences between the two languages.BR This paper examined a translation of a short story written by Su Tong based on four principles: 1) principle of necessity, a principle of compensating the target language reader for the content that they would need to have a complete understanding of the translated text; 2) principle of economy, a principle of succinct translation to ensure readability; 3) principle of equivalence, a principle of making compensation by rendering a translation in a form different from the original to ensure semantic equivalence; 4) principle of aesthetics, a principle of materializing the artistic value of the original in its translation. This kind of analysis will help minimize the gap between the source and the target text in literary translation that is attributable to the linguistic, cultural, and artistic differences of the two languages involved, and it could also serve as a guideline for teaching literary translation.