Domesticating And Foreignizing Strategie Sin Literary Translation:A Descriptive Approach

Unlike other kinds of genre, literary texts do not conform strictly to predictable norms and conventions. Thus the translation of literary texts is very complex. The normative approach, which prescribes what to do and what not to do, is not quite suitable for literary translation. As a matter of fact, as literary translation often means comparing cultures, we need to place our discussion of literary translation in a cultural context. Culture is a relative concept; it focuses on differences rather than on commonness. Thus when rendering a text produced in one culture into another culture, one has to decide whether to aturalize the text by acculturating the differences (linguistic and cultural ones) to facilitate easy accessibility or to exoticize leaving the differences as they are and explaining strange details when necessary, so as to retain the foreign flavor. The former strategy we term it a domesticating strategy and the latter, a foreignizing one. As the normative approach cannot explain why different translators tend to adopt different strategies, the descriptive approach, which focuses on the translation process rather than on the translation itself, is proposed in this paper to investigate the translation process and the various conditioning factors during that process. We conclude that the translation process is a decision-making process. There is no ideal translation which satisfies both the author and the reader. A translator has to decide whether to take an author-oriented or a reader-oriented approach. However, not all decisions the translator makes are within his/her own control. The choice of a domesticating or a foreignizing strategy may be conditioned by the intention of the translator, the function of the target text, and a series of socio-cultural, historical and idiosyncratic constraints. In this paper, the writer proposes a odel of Translating in the Descriptive Approach iii which the conditioning factors determine the author/reader orientation, which again conditions the choice of foreignizing or domesticating strategy. The translation strategy governs the whole process of translation, which decides the -final product of translation. The translation product then can achieve the intention, fulfill the function and reflect the constraints. Therefore, we should not just focus on how texts should be matched, but what conditioning factors cause translators to translate the way they do, what they hope to achieve by translating that way and to what degree they have achieved their intention and fulfilled the function.We further test the descriptive approach with a case study of the two English versions of Hong Lou Meng. In terms of translation strategy, the Yangs version is basically foreignizing while Hawkes?version is domesticating. Pure linguistic analysis of the two versions cannot account for the success they have already achieved. After analyzing their author/reader orientation manifested in their versions, we believe that this is caused by differences in their intentions (the Yangs aim to introduce the Chinese culture into the outside world while Hawkes seeks to facilitate easy readability for the reader), their socio-cultural context and their personal preferences. However, as both translations have met their intentions and fulfilled the functions, they should be judged as successful. Thus by adopting the descriptive approach, we are able to find that both domesticating and foreignizing strategies are acceptable if they can achieve their intended functions in a given socio-cultural...