On The Fusion Of Domestication And Foreignization In Yang Bi's Translation Of Vanity Fair From The Cultural Perspective

Under the influence of economic globalization, international cooperation is getting increasingly closer. To promote and enhance a smooth advance in international cooperation, people in one country are necessary and essential to understand and respect the cultures and traditions of another country. Translation, as a bridge between different cultures, has continuously renewed its theory and ideology under the prevailing international atmosphere. Since the 1970s, strategic options of domestication and foreignization in the translation have gone through widespread debates and discussions in the world translation field. Domestication, to be specific, takes the source language as the guidance, and, to a certain extent, retains the foreign and strange elements of the original text; foreignization, on the other hand, takes the goal language as the guidance, and makes every effort to provide the target reader with an easy understanding of the original text. Domestication and foreignization both have their advantages. The translator should appropriately display the respective merits of the two translation strategies in translation practice so as to promote the target reader to understand the related foreign culture.This thesis makes a contrastive study on the translation of cultural elements in Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair translated by Yang Bi, and further discusses the dialectical relation between domestication and foreignization.In the West, domestication has always occupied a dominant position, which can be traced back to the 17th century. In British translation history, scholars like Delhram, Dryden and Tytler held that taking the target language as the translation guidance produced a smooth translation. Nida is an initiator of domestication, who takes the communicative function of translation seriously, and proposes"dynamic equivalence". American Italian scholar Venuti believes that the translation purpose is not to eliminate the linguistic and cultural differences between countries, but to manifest and retain them. A variety of factors affect the choice of the two strategies in translation process. The translation goal, text type, target readers or other factors may restrict or affect the translator's choice of translation strategies.Yang's translated version of Vanity Fair is a famous piece of translation work in China's translation field. The original is loaded with massive cultural words and expressions. How Yang appropriately chooses the translation strategies to deal with the cultural differences, and finally presents the target reader with a classical translation work, is the focus of this thesis. The synthesis of Vanity Fair translated by Yang gives a presentation of the translator's tendency towards fusion of domestication and foreignization in translation process of works with rich cultural connotations. In translation practice, domestication and foreignization are in fact not mutually exclusive but mutually supplementary. This study is of some benefit to the complete comprehension of domestication and foreignization, and brings about a better understanding of the translation of cultural elements in Yang Bi's version. Also, this study will exert certain theoretical and practical significance to the translation between English and Chinese and the cross-cultural communication between English and Chinese people. The writer sincerely hopes that this thesis can be helpful to further studies of the two strategies.