Idioms In Fortress Besieged And Its Translation

This research seeks to contribute to the debate over domestication vs. foreignization by investigating how the translators of the novel Weicheng dealt with the idioms with different types of semantic voids in its English version, Fortress Besieged and what insights can be drawn from the strategies they used to fill the voids in terms of the Skopostheorie.The idioms collected as the data of the research were classified into four groups based on Dagut's (1978) typology of semantic voids to find out what strategies are used by the two translators in managing different types of idioms. The four groups are: (1) idioms containing environmental voids; (2) idioms containing cultural voids; (3) idioms containing lexical voids; and (4) idioms with other semantic voids.The results show that the translators tried to bridge different categories of voids on the condition that the translated version should be readable. Specifically, they mainly adopted domestication strategy in the categories containing environmental and lexical voids, while the strategy of foreignization was employed much more often in translating idioms containing cultural voids about religions, beliefs and allusions, sometimes with footnotes. As to idioms with other voids, they were found to prefer the method of domestication on almost all occasions. The results were then explained within the framework of the Skopos theory.The findings are expected to contribute to the current debate over the two translation strategies of foreignization and domestication and to idiom teaching in translation class. In addition, suggestions are made for extending the range of idioms in the novel and exploiting other translation theories to gain better understanding of the results.