A Dialectic Study Of Domestication And Foreignization

For centuries it has been assumed that translation only takes place between languages and this assumption unleashed the literal and free translation debate in traditional translation theory and lies at the heart of a series of linguistic approaches to translation that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. In the past decades, with the cultural turn in the translation field, the relationship between translation and culture began to attract more and more attention. Therefore, how to effectively deal with the linguistic as well as cultural differences in translation, or in other words, whether we should adopt domestication or foreignization, becomes a hot button in the translation field.Many translators both at home and abroad have flooded translation journals with their opinions about this dispute. Observing closely, we have found that their pinions diverge most in the selection of domestication and foreignization in the translating process. At the early stage, they tended to view the two strategies as incompatible and denounced one in favor of the other and their discussions were largely about the advantages and disadvantages of the two strategies. On the threshold of the 21st century, the focus of the discussion about the two translation strategies in China has shifted from which one is better to which one should be the dominant strategy in the current literary translation in China. Although the current focus of discussion takes a more dialectic attitude towards the two strategies and different opinions may be justified in some ways, their studies are still one-sided in some ways because they each try to study the problem only from one perspective. They tend to overstress one strategy and ignore the positive and indispensable role of the other or overemphasize some factors and totally exclude the other. The present study attempts to hold a dialectic position on this dispute and claims that domestication and foreignization are both justified and valuable. On this basis, this thesis elaborates on different perspectives provided by different translation theories and attempts to probe into some main constraining factors in the choice of translation strategies. By making these attempts, the present thesis is intended to overcome the weak points of the current studies in this aspect and give this dispute a more comprehensive and overall study.This thesis is mainly divided into the following parts: in the introduction part, the emergence of the controversy over domestication and foreignization is generally studied and the current research in this respect and what this present thesis is intendedto achieve are briefly presented; chapter one probes into the definitions of domestication and foreignization and clarifies the relationship between this dispute and the old debate of literal & free translation; chapter two gives a diachronic study of domestication and foreignization both in China and western countries, which is hoped to be of help to the further study of the two in the following chapters; chapter three elaborates some new and special perspectives on the study of domestication and foreignization provided by some translation theories, which have largely broadened the study; in chapter four, by combining different perspectives studied in chapter three as well as drawing on the studies of some Chinese translation theorists, the present paper sums up some factors influencing the selection of domestication and foreignization and gives a detailed study of them; in the final part, some tentative conclusions are drawn and the limitations of this study and its implications for the further study about this topic are briefly presented.This study, with its tentative characteristic, is not intended to give a final answer to this controversy but rather to provide some implications for the handling of the two strategies in actual practice and the further study of them.