On Venuti's Foreignization

Foreignization is proposed by Lawrence Venuti in one of his famous books of The Translator's Invisibility---A History of Translation in 1995. Based on the criticism of the traditional translation method of domestication, foreignizing translation aims to resist the Anglo-America cultural hegemony, make the cultural otherness of the foreign text manifested in translation so that the target language readers can have a better understanding of the original poems. It has been a hot issue among scholars at home and abroad since this theory is put forward by Venuti. The discussion has broken the traditional linguistic level and involved culture, poetics and politics. This paper aims to probe into the image transference in the Chinese classical poetry from the perspective of foreignization. As is known to all, Chinese classical poetry is not only the gem of Chinese culture but also the important component of the world literature. In the process of international cultural communication, it plays a positive role in spreading Chinese culture. Indeed, poetry translation is a kind of hard and painful task, while the Chinese classical poetry complicates the problems further. Discussion on poetry translation theory and practice never ceases and it will need more efforts and hard explorations. Until now, an increasing number of translators and scholars have made their attempts and contributed a lot to the promotion of the excellent Chinese cultural heritage. However, poetry translation has to face problems such as cultural misreading, elimination of cultural differences and so on. When the Chinese classical poetry are translated into English, in most cases, foreign translators and sinologists will adopt the domesticating translation and choose the translated text according to the dominated ideology and faith, thus the translations are usually inscribed with the target values. Such a kind of translating strategy not only misses out the foreignness of different cultures but also hinders the process of the cross-cultural communication and dissemination of the weak cultures. Therefore, with the purpose of promoting true Chinese culture, in the process of the translation, foreignization should be adopted as the first choice by the Chinese translators because foreignizing translation can effectively convey the cultural connotation of the original poetic images, making the translation so proper with the source text's style and subjective feelings. The target readers can fully understand and experience the exotic customs. As an important unit of poetry, poetic images bear rich and unique Chinese culture and they deserve enough attention in the process of Chinese–English translation. That can fully convey the cultural connotation of the poem and true subjective emotions of the poet, and then to enhance worldwide spreading of Chinese culture and the development of the whole translation undertaking. In this thesis, the author will choose the poetic images by Li Bai and Du Fu as the case study and treat the following aspects. In the introduction, we briefly talk about the reason for choosing this topic, review of the former studies, researching method and the layout of this thesis. As the basis for our later analysis, in the first chapter, we will have a brief review of Lawrence Venuti's translation theory, including the challenge to domestication, promotion of foreignization, debates on this pair of terminology and its difference between Literal and free translations. In the second chapter, we will have a simple but comprehensive introduction to image related theory namely meaning, functions, and factors causing the difficulties in poetry translation. Chapter three is the most important part of this thesis. Here features of Li Bai and Du Fu's poetic images and its translation at home and abroad will be discussed in detail. Based on the close analysis of the feature of poetic images by Li Bai and Du Fu, the images can be classified into three categories namely descriptive images, rhetoric images and symbolic images. According to making a contrastive analysis of different English versions containing these images, the author tries to point out foreignizing translating strategy is used by the translator and how it is realized. Based on the case study, the author thinks that foreignization should be given priority in the image reproduction in order to convey the original images, preserve the exotic flavor and make the target readers have a better appreciation of Chinese culture. The last section of this chapter involves the contribution and limitation of foreignizing translation strategy so that we can have a comprehensive understanding of it. The last chapter is the conclusion. This part summarizes what we have talked in the previous parts.