A Cultural Study Of Domestication And Foreignization In Translation Of Relic Documents In Museums

Along with the human society entering a new era, the 21st century, there have been brought unprecedented prosperity and diversity toward the intercultural exchanges among nations all over the world. As a place established for public science and education, museum serves as a platform that provides people the opportunity to share and appreciate the cultural and art treasures that are the representations of human courage and wisdom in the course of the mankind civilization, which can be referred to as museum culture.This thesis seeks to explore and reconsider the issue of domestication and foreignization, advanced by the Cultural School in translation studies that aims to lift the discussions of translation to a cultural and political height, from a comparatively new perspective. Relic documents that introduce and describe the displayed cultural relics contain a variety of culturally loaded information. With the question of whether the translation of the specific information and the underlying factors determining translator's strategy can be expounded by the theory of domestication and foreignization or not, the author of this paper, based on the data collection of relic documents from a number of museums, is thus inspired to make a comparison and analysis of the translation of cultural information revealed in those documents. Grounded on the definition of domestication and foreignization given by Lawrence Venuti, the paper classifies the translating strategies applied in the translation of the specific information into categories, and in the mean time, based on the statement of underlying factors determining the translator's strategy proposed by Andre Lefevere, this study makes a descriptive elaboration that under the circumstance of diverse cultural backgrounds, influenced by different forms of ideology, the translator tends to adopt the translating strategy that conforms to the prevalent ideology, thus produces different types of translated texts, which also imprints the translated text with the shadow of the dominating culture. The author intends to prove that this phenomenon is also reflected in the translation of relic documents.With the investigation into the different translating strategies applied to the translation of relic documents, the present study is set to make its contribution to the practice of relic document translation in China, as well as broaden and enrich the scope of current translation studies, particularly provide useful insights for the study of domestication and foreignization, promoting it to develop in a more systematic and comprehensive manner.