Domestication Or Foreignization

Since the 1970s, in the Western translation circle, the emphasis on thelinguistic transfer has been shifted to the emphasis on the cultural representation. Butonly in the past ten years have remarkable achievements been made in China'stranslation arena.Most modern translation theorists agree on the fact that translation is not only thetransference between languages, but also the transference between cultures. Moreover,more importance is attached to the transference of culture. Translation is defined as akind of cross-cultural communication. In the process of translation, cultural differencesinterfere with the transference of language. Cultural factors are the specificmanifestations of cultural diversities. The cultural factors, to be exact, the wordscontaining cultural factors, can be transferred, or transplanted.There are two strategies as to transfer cultural factors involved in translation:"domestication" and "foreignization". Domestication and foreignization are twodifferent translation strategies. The former refers to the translation strategy in which aeligible, fluent style is adopted in order to minimize the strangeness of the foreign textin the mind target language readers, while the latter designates the type of translation inwhich a target text deliberately breaks target language conventions by retainingsomething of the foreignness of the original. People have been engaged in translationstudies from a cross-cultural perspective. This dissertation tries to illustrate how toimplement the translation strategies in the cross-cultural context.Compared to a rare flower with brilliant hues in the area of Chinese literature,Hong Lou Meng remains unsurpassed in the history of Chinese culture. Numerousreaders have been attracted by the artistic glamour of the great classic. Cao Xueqin wasnot only an unparalleled writer but also a remarkable painter. By means of color termsand color images, he painted varicolored scroll paintings, enabling the readers towitness the erection and collapse of the red mansions. All the colors in the naturalworld-red, orange, yellow, green, black, blue and purple were put in good use either todepict landscapes or to express the characters' emotions. Each color in the book seemsto be full of emotions and thus is of unique artistic charm. In line with translationaesthetics and linguistic theory, the thesis examines the color terms in Hong Lou Meng from various angles and probes into the appropriate way to translate them.The dissertation is composed of six parts. The first part is an introduction and thesecond part deals with literature review concerning domestication and foreignization,such as Bassnett's cultural translation. The third part is concerned with the colour wordsin the Chinese culture and English culture. The fourth and fifth part is an analytical casestudy of the two translated versions of Hong Lou Meng. This paper elaborates on thedetailed exploration of the cultural, subjective and contextual factors that determine thetranslators' choice of foreignization or domestication. At last, a tentative framework ofreferent is presented for the examination of the issue, as well as drawing the conclusionthat domestication and foreignization are indispensable and complementary to eachother.