Domestication And Foreignization In Literary Translation

Translation is not only a bilingual activity but also a bicultural one. With the rapid development of economy and cultural exchanges, unprecedented attention is being paid to cultural aspect in translation. The close relationship between language and culture demands that translators should attach importance to the study of culture-loaded words because some cultural information obvious to the source language reader may be difficult for the target language reader to understand. This is especially true of the translation of literary works. This thesis makes a close examination of how exactly to convey the cultural information contained in the culture-loaded words in literary translation.There exist two opposite viewpoints on the issue of how to deal with cultural differences in the translation circle both at home and abroad, that is, foreignization and domestication. The two sides hold their respective opinions firmly and cannot come to an agreement. In recent years, many works and articles on foreignization and domestication have been published at home and abroad, which have broadened the study of the two from different angles.The thesis is to expound the reasonability of both foreignization and domestication from the perspective of western contemporary critical theory, thus resulting in the conclusion that overemphasizing foreignization or domestication statically and absolutely is one-sided and unscientific and that co-existence of the two is inevitable. The practice of literary translation since 1870 in China has also proved that the two strategies are supplementary and cannot be separated from each other. However, they cannot be treated equally in literary translation. In order to successfully fulfill the task of cultural exchange of translation, translators should take various factors into consideration and carefully choose appropriate translation strategies. They should use the two as flexibly as possible and follow the rule that foreignization should be dominant and domestication be supplementary, which is the general trend of the development of literary translation in the future.In the later part of the thesis, the author makes a case study of the translation strategies and methods of the culture-loaded words and expressions in Ru Lin Wai Shi. Through the statistical data and analysis of the translation methods adopted in TheScholars, the thesis expounds the relationship between foreignization and domestication in the translation of literary works, i.e., foreignization comes first and domestication second, which will provide valuable instructions for translators who translate literary works.