Domestication And Foreignization In Film Translation Out Of English

Film translation is innately related to cross-cultural study. Translating a text from one culture to another usually requires that a choice first be made between two basic translation strategies: domestication and foreignization. The former refers to the translation strategy in which a transparent, fluent style is adopted in order to minimize the strangeness of the foreign text for target language readers. The latter designates the type of translation in which a target text "deliberately breaks target conventions by retaining something of the foreignness of the original". (Shuttleworth & Cowie, 1997:59) This paper just tries to explore the possibility of combining domestication and foreignization with the translation of English language films into Chinese. This paper is made up of four major parts. The first part deals with a careful analysis of the nature and characteristics of film language and film translation. Film dialogue is constructed as an intentional, self-conscious text, which at the same time mimics everyday face-to-face conversation. A film translator has to face much more constraints and take more things into consideration than an author of a literary work does. There are mainly two forms of film translation: dubbing and subtitling. The two language converting methods are alternative in film translation. In reality, choices made in relation to dubbing vs. subtitling are often the result of the complex interaction of a number of factors in addition to the merely economic, political and historical ones. Current audience preferences for particular modes of film translation are not unalterable and they might be transformed by familiarization with other alternatives. The second part reviews the history of film translation in China. Film translation in China has gone through hardships in the early period of its development, the golden era of film dubbing in the early 1980s and a co-existence and fierce competition between film dubbing and subtitling at present. The third part puts forward two basic translation strategies: domestication and foreignization. Domestication means making the text recognizable and familiar and thus bringing the foreign culture closer to the reader in the target culture. Foreignization means to take the reader over to the foreign culture and to make him or her feel the linguisticand cultural differences. The two translation strategies are not contradictory but complementary to each other in the translating process. In translation practice, there is no foreignization without some degree of domestication; by the same token, there is no domestication without some degree of foreignization. Translated material can be domesticated or foreignized to different extents, and hence be placed somewhere along the domestication- foreignization continuum. The fourth part of the paper is about the domestication and foreignization in film translation, especially in the translation of English language films into Chinese. In order to successfully transfer the meaning of the culture-bound expressions and ideas in English language films, a film translator has to be not only bi-lingual but also bi-cultural. His duty is to provide a faithful reproduction of the source English language film most favored by the target Chinese audience. On the one hand, he has to try every means to preserve the "foreignness" of the English language film by reproducing the linguistic and cultural flavor contained in the film; on the other hand, he has to maintain, in the target film, a degree of comprehensibility and familiarity by providing equivalents in the target Chinese culture. In this part, the Chinese translations of the religious expressions, expressions with regional characteristics, fixed expressions and proverbs in some English language films are discussed from the perspectives of domestication and foreignization. In film translation, an appropriate and flexible combination of domestication and foreignization is the only way in which cultural conflicts in films can be settled.