Cultural Strategies For E-C/C-E Idiom Translation: Domestication & Foreignization

Idiom, as gem of language and deposit of culture, is a unique composition in the process of culture construction and development. Owing to their conciseness in form and richness in meaning, they are widely employed by both Chinese people and English people in daily life and literary works. However, the merits of idioms also bring about difficulties in translating. To help the readers to better understand this language form and consequently the culture of a foreign nation, translation theorists have long been probing the effective translation strategies. Unfortunately, most of them confine their strategies to a linguistic perspective. In fact, the translation of idioms involves not only the transfer of language but also the transmission of culture since translation is in essence intercultural communication.A heated controversy over domestication and foreignization has been launched in both translation practice and theory since these two terms came into being. As two important cultural strategies, domestication is target-language-culture-biased and it helps to achieve immediate understanding of the translaiton when dealing with some cultural terms that are rarely seen and hardly comprehensible in idiom translation, but it tends to veil the source language cultural features from the target language readers; while foreignization is source-language-culture-biased and it helps the target language readers to fully appreciate the special source language culture and enriches the target language, but it may hinder the target readers understanding when the source language terms are too unique to understand. While these two strategies have their respective merits and demerits, this thesis points out that in regard to cultural transfer, the object of translation, foreignization should be the main strategy in English-Chinese(E-C) and Chinese-English(C-E) idiom translation because of its incomparable advantages.The thesis reaches the conclusion that foreignization should be applied as the dominant strategy while domestication as the supplementary one and sometimes a combination of both is also necessary in E-C/C-E idiom translation so as to better serve the cross-cultural communication between the two languages.