A Translator's Subjective Cultural Attitude And His Selection Of Translation Strategy

Translation is in nature an intercultural communication. Domestication and foreignization are two different strategies in dealing with culture differences or even conflicts in translation. Then what are the factors that influence a translator' s strategic selection? Itamar Even-zohar, one of the representative figures of descriptive school, explained this from a completely new perspective with his Poly-system Theory: strong cultures tend to relegate the translated literature in a secondary position in its literary polysystem, and consequently translators tend to adopt a domesticating way of translation, while within weaker cultures, translated literature always assumes a primary position in the polysystem and thus the translation strategy is often foreignization-oriented. Compared with traditional translation studies, the polysystem theory has its obvious theoretical advances and rationality, but the author of the paper finds that the theory is not without limitations, for it cannot explain the coexistence of the two different strategies during one single historical period in the translation history of a culture, and the fact that translators still stick to the domesticating way of translation while the culture has actually declined, etc. Therefore, inthis paper, the author firstly analyzes the essense of the theory, its advances and limitations, and then based on the theory, puts forward a hypothesis that takes into account the translator' s subjective attitude towards the culture, a point that is crucial but neglected by the theory. After this, the author makes an elaborate analysis of Chinese culture and its translation history, this way, further exposing the theory' s limitations with historical facts on the one hand, and getting the author' s hypothesis successfully verified on the other. By this, the paper perfects the polysystem theory, broadens the view of translation study, and constitutes a contribution to the study of descriptive school and the whole translation field as well.