Foreignization Or Domestication?

Euphemisms, as culture-loaded terms, reflect a nation's development and its changes in politics, economics, culture and ideology. They have been used extensively in people's life and have become an indispensable part both in Chinese and English vocabulary. With the international communication becoming more frequent, the translation of euphemisms has inevitably become more important. But at present time, it has not got its deserved concern in research and its translation: the translator often just renders its semantic meaning while neglecting its inner culture and causes the unnecessary cultural loss.In view of this, the author tries to analyze in this thesis which strategy, domestication or foreignization, should be the major choice in translating Chinese euphemisms from the perspective of cultural schema. By introducing cultural schema, the author wants the reader to have a general understanding of schema theory and its importance in the developing of translation research. According to Reiss' text typology, the author classifies the texts on which the foreignization and domestication analysis can be carried successfully. The author also proposes the definitions and characteristics of the Chinese and English euphemisms, and concludes that it is possible to translate Chinese euphemism into English. Then the author discusses which strategy, foreignization or domestication, should be the proper one in translating different text types. After analyzing "the intention of the text, language features, the importance of the euphemism in the text, the readership in each text type and the reading coherence" synthetically, the author explores whether creating a new cultural schema is necessary in each type of text and then draws the conclusion: in a content-focused and appeal-focused text, domestication strategy should be the best choice, and in a form-focused and news-focused text, the translator should adopt foreignization as his major strategy.In all, the translator should not only translate the deep meaning but also the inner culture the important euphemisms contain according to different text types and different influencing elements to attain the cultural communication goal.