Domesticating And Foreignizing Strategies In Translation Across Cultures

The exchange and communication between languages are in essence the exchangesbetween cultures. The major task of translation across cultures is to turn the culturalcontent in one language into another, so whether it is faithful or not largely depends onthe degrees of the translator's grasp of the two languages and the subtle difference of thecultural content expressed in the languages. Therefore translators will encounter theproblem of culture and its representations. To deal with this problem, theorists have come up with two kinds of strategies thathave aroused heated debates. This thesis sets out to study these two strategies on culturetranslation: domestication and foreignization and to clarify their relations and scientificchoice in translation across cultures. In my present thesis numerous authentic translated versions are collected toanalyze the characteristics of the two strategies. The aim of this thesis is to offer somepractical standards for choosing one of the strategies in order to provide translators withsome help in their translation practice. In the first part, a brief account about language, translation and culture is given. Inthe second part, the paper mainly introduces these two translation strategies, theiradvocates, theoretical basis and ways to practice these two strategies. The third part analyzes Chinglish, a phenomenon resulting from an unscientificchoice of strategies in the process of Chinese-English translation. It is an example ofover-foreignization that reveals the translator's incapability of discerning the markeddifferences between Chinese and English. Five variables composed of purpose of translation, types of the source texts,readership, writer intention and stages of cultural communication should be involved toaccess the appropriateness of domestication or foreignization. From the analysis above, it is concluded that the two strategies have theirrespective features and applicable values. Overemphasis of one strategy from a staticand absolute viewpoint is one-sided and unscientific. We should not only study meritsand defects of the two translation strategies, but also analyze their respective values ofapplication as to under what circumstances, for what purpose and in what text types weshould use them. We can never regard a translation strategy as absolute nor can weexclude completely one strategy. A dialectical view of translation strategies isadvantageous to the prosperity of translation studies.