Abstract: With the development of economic globalization and the deepening of China' reform and opening, it gains considerable concern as to translate and spread Chinese culture. Due to the differences in society，history, religion and so on between western countries and eastern countries, it is quite difficult to perfectly convert source language to target language. That is to say, the untranslatability between two languages that increasing the difficulty. The famous British translation theorist Catford divided it into linguistic untranslatability and cultural untranslatability according to its causes. This paper adopts catford’s classification and analyzes the untranslatability from linguistic and cultural two aspects in Chinese-English translation. Besides, because translation compensation is necessary, this paper also analyzes the compensatory strategies. This paper is composed of five parts. The first part is the introduction. The second part introduces Nida’s functional equivalence. The third part analyzes the linguistic untranslatability in Chinese-English translation and the compensatory strategies. The fourth part analyzes the cultural untranslatability in Chinese-English translation and the compensatory strategies. The last part is the comparison in translation compensation between linguistic and cultural untranslatability and conclusion. It is hoped that this paper will provide some suggestions for the future translation and help to improve the development of international communication.
Key Words: untranslatability; linguistic; culture; compensatory strategies

摘  要：随着经济全球化的发展以及中国改革开放的深入，如何有效地翻译和传播中国文化引起了公众广泛的关注。由于中西方国家在社会、历史、宗教等方面都有很大区别，所以很难完美地将原语转换成目标语，即两种语言间存在的不可译性是翻译的难点所在。英国翻译理论家卡特福德根据不可译性产生的原因将其分为语言上的不可译性和文化上的不可译性。本文采用卡特福德的分类原则，从语言和文化两方面分析汉英翻译中存在的不可译性。而翻译补偿的必要性致使本文也将对语言和文化的不可译补偿策略做简要分析。本文分为五个部分，第一部分是绪论，第二部分主要介绍奈达的功能对等理论，第三部分具体分析了汉英翻译中语言不可译及其补偿策略，第四部分具体分析了汉英翻译中文化的不可译及其补偿策略，最后一部分是对语言和文化不可译补偿策略的对比分析及结论。本文旨在希望能对未来翻译给出一些建议并能对国际交流发展有所帮助。
关键词：不可译性；语言；文化；补偿策略

Translation is inter-communication activity to transfer messages from one language to another. Untranslatability refers to a kind of language or unit cannot translate into another language or unit and cannot be achieved or not fully realized people that using different language communication and understanding. However, untranslatability is not absolute. What translators can do is spare no effort to compensate them by using reasonable compensatory strategies. J.C. Catford divided untranslatability into linguistic untranslatability and cultural untranslatability. This paper will mainly analyze linguistic untranslatability and cultural untranslatability in Chinese- English translation. Since translation compensation is the necessary method to make up the untranslatability, several domestic and foreign translation scholars have made much contribution to it. Different translators put forward different categories on their different standard. This paper mainly introduces the compensatory strategies including literal translation, free translation, transliteration, literal translation with notes and substitution and so on. With the development of international communication, translation is in the gradual improvement. Though there are many translation theorists who have come up with lots of compensatory strategies, there are no systematic conclusions for untranslatability in Chinese-English translation.