Foreignizing Translation And Culture Transmission

With the deepening of the communication between China and foreign countries, The English translation of Chinese Folk Wisecracks has become the topic in which translation domestic scholars interested. But as CFWs carry abundant language and culture connotation, how to represent the connotation faithfully to the Western readers has become a difficult point. Hong Lou Meng is one of the Chinese ancient masterpieces of literature. Due to its wide-ranging and meticulous structure, profound culture connotation and exquisite language, it is universally recognized as an epitome of the art of the classical novel in China. The CFWs in Hong Lou Meng are diversified in content and constitute types and the application of them is flexible, which fully displays the Chinese traditional culture. Venuti considers, "the aim of opposing domestication in British and American tradition and advocating foreignization is to develop a translation theory and practice to resist dominant place of target-language culture". The essence of foreignizing translation is to manifest foreignness. In this thesis, foreignizing translation is adopted as the theoretical framework to analyze Yang Xianyi's CFWs translation in Hong Lou Meng:Venuti adopts the term "invisible" to describe the translator's status in British and American culture. Domestication has been the dominant translation method in Anglo-American culture, which results in the fact that "fluency" has been considered as the important norm to judge the quality of translation. Venuti opposes the "invisibility" of the translator caused by domesticating translation. He promotes translator's "visibility" to highlight translator's subjectivity. He reveals the connotation of foreignizing and domesticating translation and points out the essence of foreignization—manifesting the foreignness in original text. Foreignization is one of cultural strategies in translation and it highlights and promotes the translator's status. "Abusive fidelity" can be adopted to resist the transparent illusion brought about by fluent translation and stress the lingual and cultural differences in foreign texts. Venuti also employs "resistancy" to state his translation thought. It is a translation strategy which can preserve the foreignness in literal works translation.Chinese Folk Wisecrack is a unique language form created in Chinese people's living practice and it reflects distinct national-characteristics. According to the content, it can be categorized into two groups—with figurativeness and with pun. The content and constitute types of CFWs in Hong Lou Meng are diversified and the structures are flexible, enhancing the artistic effect, making characters more striking and deepening the ideological content. The translation of CFWs is challenging. As CFW is the unique expression in Chinese, it has no corresponding form in English, so how to name it in English has become a problem. As it is created by Chinese people and possesses the cultural features, how to transmit the culture and translate the homophonic puns are the difficult points.Yang Xianyi has always thought introducing Chinese culture to the foreigners faithfully is the most important. With this purpose, he emphasizes on being faithful to the original image and preserving "strangeness". In the translation of CFWs, Yang Xianyi mainly employs the translation techniques of literal translation or literal translation combined with liberal translation. By comparing Yang Xianyi's and Hawkes'translation of CFWs in Hong Lou Meng, we can find that Yang Xianyi mainly adopts foreignizing translation to keep Chinese traditional culture in the maximum degree. Culture possesses the characteristic of differentia which appears in the form of nationalities. So culture becomes the symbol of national identity. Yang Xianyi's translation of CFWs in Hong Lou Meng resists cultural adaption and achieves cultural communication.Under the guidance of Venuti's translation theory, this thesis analyzes Yang Xianyi's translation of CFWs in Hong Lou Meng and tries to verify that foreignizing translation is beneficial to the transmission of culture.