The difficulty of producing an identical version of the SL has been proved by almost all translation theorists. The translator faces some difficulties to make the original text and his work overlap, for the simple reason that source language text and target language one do not overlap. There are different strategies of translation which the translator can adopt to fulfil his task. One of these strategies is compensation. In other words, when the translator finds a great difficulty to translate something, he can do something instead, which goes with the spirit of the original text and does not ruin the meaning. This paper gives a detailed theoretical account of the concept of compensation in translation. It proposes a new approach to present a detailed description of compensation . It also proposes using reliable criteria to assess the ability to use compensation as a translation strategy.