The Past And Prospect Of Cultural Translation

For ages, which should be superb in cultural translation, domesticating translation or foreignizing translation, is a controversial issue in cultural translation studies. This thesis, from the perspective of deconstruction, probes into the internal law of cultural translation.Eugene A. Nida is a leading scholar in modern domesticating translating studies. To achieve the fluency, he presents function equivalence and dynamic equivalence. He holds that there are two different types of equivalence, namely formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence. Many researchers and scholars in China have also dwelt much upon these two notions from different perspectives. As one of Chinese representatives in domesticating translation studies, Lin Shu is famous for his translation of Western literary works into classical Chinese. Chapter 3 analyses Lin Shu's domesticating translation from perspectives of poetic equivalence, spirit and style. No matter in which era he is in, the translator needs to adopt domesticating translation to convey the culture from the source language to the target language.Roland Barthes put forward the theory of 'The Death of The Author' in 1977. This theory states that the meaning of text changes unceasingly to different readers. Therefore, the translation of the target text would develop as time goes by. Then, what is the trend of its development? Is it domesticating translation or foreignizing translation? The following of this paper centers on the trend of version's development. Based on Lawrence Venuti's theory of domesticating and foreignizing translation, the author intends to reveal the internal law of cultural translation in Chapter 4. Many classics were translated and retranslated by people in different periods. For instance, William Shakespeare's Sonnet 66 was translated by Gu Zhengkun in 1998 and Tu An in 2000. By detailed comparison, it is Tu An's version that appears to be more foreignizing than Gu Zhengkun's version, though Tu An adopted domesticating translation strategy to some extent. This chapter also analyzes Huang Jizhong's Tangmu Dabo de Xiaowu and his foreignizing translation. Compared with Lin Shu's translation of this novel, this version is also more oriented towards foreignization.The author believes that it isn't reasonable to argue which should be superb, domestication or foreignization. Translators need to adopt domestication strategy to help readers fully appreciate foreign culture no matter which era they are in. This is the reason why every translator adopts domestication strategy in doing his translation. However, as time passes by, readers are no longer satisfied with the old versions, as they need to know more native things of foreign culture. This is why some classics are often retranslated in every era. hi this thesis, a comparative study of Lin Shu's and Huang Jizhong's translations is presented to illustrate the author's opinion of the relationship between domesticating translation and foreiginizing translation. Through this comparison, we can see that the extent of foreignizing translation in new edition is more than that in its predecessor.Through the above analyses, the conclusion is that the development law of cultural translation accords with dialectical materialism, i.e., domesticating translation and foreignizing translation play important roles in the target culture respectively. They can not replace but perfect each other. The disjunction and fusion of them would help to promote the cultural translation's development.