Domestication & Foreignization Should Serve For Balances In Both Translation And Intercultural Communication

The conflict between domestication and foreignization as opposite translation strategies is a long-standing issue. Since 1980s, discussions in the West have been expanded from translation itself to a macro cultural environment, involving society, politics, ideology, and so on. Italian-American scholar Venuti was the first to advocate foreignization, as a resistant strategy to oppose cultural hegemony exerted by English-speaking countries. Now in China, discussions tend to follow this trend of privileging foreignizing translation over domesticating translation. Most of the discussions, however, are conducted from the perspective of translation studies confined by traditional linguistics. This paper intends to explore the function of D & F from perspectives of both translation and intercultural communication. Through careful library research, the author found that Chinese culture suffered a severe adverse balance when communicating with Anglo-American culture, in the way that it imported much cultural information but exported little. The following assumption, therefore, was made: to make good use of D & F to control cultural information delivered in translation, thus to reduce the adverse balance. In order to do so, foreignization can be used more in C-E translation to spread more Chinese cultural information, while domestication can be used relatively more in E-C translation to prevent the influx of English cultural information. As translation strategies, however, D & F should also serve for the balance in translation itself. And, whether D & F can serve for balances in both translation and intercultural communication becomes a question to be answered in this paper. A study was then made to analyze the application situation of D & F in 72 Chinese/English translations in the section of "Translation Practice" in Chinese Translators' Journal. Suggestions of using D & F to benefit intercultural communication as well as translation were made soon afterwards, and analyzed at theoretical level. The paper holds, it is very necessary and also is feasible to use the adjusting role of translation to seek balance in intercultural communication. D & F can serve for balances in both translation and intercultural communication.