Foreignization And Domestication

With the flourishing of cultural study of translation, the former focus of literal and free translation has been shifted to that of domestication and foreignization. It has aroused the interests of linguists and translators at home and abroad. The scholars, some supporting one and opposing to the other, some trying to make a compromise between them, researched this issue of translation from various perspectives.This thesis endeavors to study this subject from the perspective of cultural communication, especially against the background of cultural globalization, when preserving the cultural diversity being a more urgent issue than ever before.The first chapter serves as an introduction, reviewing how the argument of domestication and foreignization came into being and making definitions of the two schools. It also introduces the aims as well as the scope of research of this thesis.Chapter Two is the literature review. Section One and Section Two present the ideas and theories of these two schools respectively. Section Three is the author's opinion. It examines the theories of the representatives of domestication school, and reveals the limitation of this school. It analyses the most influential translation theory in China—functional equivalence, and points out that because of the radical differences across cultures and the inseparable relationship between language and culture, functional equivalence is hardly achievable, so, this school, although dominant in the field of translation, does have a vital defect, that is, it conforms the cultural features of the source language to that of the target one.Chapter Three is a research of the fundamental aim of translation. It proposes that under the circumstance of cultural globalization, when Chinese culture is in an unfavorable situation, it is particularly essential for Chinese - English translators to adopt the foreignization strategy to spread Chinese culture to the world. It also points out that the value of translation lies in the communication of cultural differences. If the foreign features are adapted to the native ones for the fluency of the version, the purpose...