The Recipient Environment: An Approach To Domestication And Foreignization

Cultural gaps between the source language and the target language have always turned out to be a hard nut for translators to crack. Domestication and foreignization, the two strategies a translator employs in dealing with them, have given rise to much controversy in recent years.To clarify the misunderstanding that domestication and foreignization are liberal and literal translation in other words, this thesis first distinguishes the two pairs of terms and points out that the former pair is mainly concerned with cultural connotations while the latter are ways to deal with the linguistic form.In the hope of finding out the leading factors of domestication and foreignization, this thesis then surveys domestication and foreignization from the historical perspective by a research of the two strategies adopted in Chinese history, which include domestication in the late Qing Dynasty and foreignization in the May Fourth period. Inspired by the descriptive translation theory, the author explores domestication and foreignization in a descriptive approach. Unlike traditional prescriptive theories, the descriptive theory insists that the study of a translation should be subject to a certain cultural environment. By analyzing the environment and the correspondent strategy adopted in each epoch, the author concludes that domestication or foreignization is confined to the social, cultural and political factors of a specific historical period. When the target culture views itself as being superior to the source culture, the translator tends to adopt the domesticating strategy. If the target culture regards itself as inferior to the source culture, the foreignizing strategy may be employed. Therefore it is the author's opinion that domestication or foreignization in fact embodies the translator's interpretation of the power relation between the two cultures.Finally, an analysis is made to the recipient environment of China in the twenty-first century. On the one hand, China is still at the periphery of the world culture, so the influence from the powerful culture is inevitable. On the other hand, along with the deeper understanding of the foreign culture, Chinese readers' cultural competence has improved and their taste for more foreignness in the translation must be satisfied. In view of this recipient environment, foreignization should play a leading role in Chinese translation in the new century, which is not only feasible but also essential.