The Visibility And Invisibility Of The Translator

The thesis addresses the visibility and invisibility of the translator, which has been a fairly important topic during the past hundreds of years. In the thesis, great effort has been made to prove that whether the translator in a translated text is visible relates much to the ideology and technology of the translator per se, with his/her subjectivity toward two orientations: foreignization versus domestication. In practical translation, domestication is prone to make the translator visible, while foreignization invisible.The thesis is to put forward the motif by means of amending the notion of Lawrence Venuti. Venuti, the representative of American deconstructionist translation studies, has done a great deal to make deconstructive analysis of the identity of the translator, which is also the mainstream of the present-day studies. In this thesis, this intention is equally approved. Traditional translation studies almost focus all the attention on the text itself, neglecting the subjectivity of the translator, while modern research has already begun to change the situation. However, it is not a signal for doing the opposite. Venuti proposes resistance in translating text with alien cultures to improve the translator's visibility, which will quite possibly lead to another dilemma, i.e. in order to make the translator visible, losing sight of the demand of the source text, or rather the target one, as well as the communication between the two.The ideal approach to probe into the issue would be reader analysis. What can be affirmed by now is that the nature of translation is to enter the target language, but the entry can not be rested on the linguistic level. What needs to be further affirmed is that the destination of translation is not the target language, but the target language readers. A translation is not an isolated island; on the contrary, it is supposed to be comprehended and appreciated by the readers. If the translator does nothing but to maintain the exotic flavor of the source text, which can not be accepted by the target readers otherwise, the translation loses its value of existence, and at the same time, the translator himself / herself goes astray.To synthesize theory with practice, a few samples will be chosen from the Chinese translations of The Da Vinci Code and researched with a comparative study.