The Application Of Domestication And Foreignization In Translating Chinese Ci-poetry: From The Perspective Of Memetics

Ci-poetry, as the gem of Chinese language and the essence of Chinese culture, plays an important role in Chinese history of literature and is welcomed by the people from both China and abroad. Some scholar even argued that "Ci-poetry is the most beautiful poetry in Chinese poetry" (Gu Zhengkun, 2003). As the essence of traditional Chinese culture, Ci-poetry represents many aspects of China at that time such as economy, geography, politics and culture and life. In order to make Ci-poetry understood, accepted and thus enjoyed by more and more foreign readers, translators must make careful translations and that makes translation of Ci-poetry more complicated. Different translators may make different translations according to their own understanding and ability. The translators must keep faithfulness in their translations and at the same time make them recognized and understood by western culture.In the process of culture communication, whether people from different culture can understand each other is not only determined by their own understanding on language itself, but also by the understanding on the culture connotation loaded by language. To translators, only profound understanding on culture differences can make them solve these difficulties smoothly in translation. How to translate the expressions with thick color of a unique culture and nation into another language, namely, the selection of domestication or foreignization in translation, is a long-debated issue in translation circle. Therefore, many scholars proposed various and different opinions.In this thesis the author draws an analysis on the cultural factors that influences Ci-poetry translation and discusses the two strategies—domestication and foreignization to deal with culture information during the process of translating Ci-poetry, and then adopts memetic theory to make an analysis on them on the purpose of providing a new perspective for the research on domestication and foreignization. After comparing and analyzing different translations of Ci-poetry, the author ultimately finds that both domestication and foreignization played an important role in Ci-poetry translation, the transformation of meme leads us in dealing with the source language text flexibly by means of domestication and foreignization. Domestication translation is an imperative phase at the early stage of meme transmission, while foreignization translation is the inevitable need and trend of meme transmission. Therefore, domestication paves the way for foreignization. Foreignization will become the mainstream in literary translation and domestication will continue to play an important role. So domestication and foreignization will coexist for a long time, it is of no use to discuss which one is better.In the first chapter, an introduction is made. In the second chapter, the author makes an introduction on Ci-poetry at first, and then discusses whether Ci-poetry is translatable and draws a conclusion. In the third chapter, the author introduces memetics and discusses the relationship between meme and translation. In the fourth chapter, the author introduces the two translation strategies, domestication and foreignization. In the fifth chapter the author makes an analysis on domestication and foreignization in translating Ci-poetry on the basis of comparisons between different translations from several aspects such as tune patterns, religious cultures, allusions, unique things and measure words via analyzing the concrete translation examples. Furthermore, the author tries to inquire the reasons and the effects of these two strategies from several perspectives such as culture, meme transmission and history, and then draws a conclusion. Chapter six is the summary of the whole thesis.