| This thesis mainly deals with the choice of domestication and foreignization as two alternative strategies in translation. Domestication means bringing the foreign culture closer to the reader in the target culture, making the target text recognizable and familiar to the readers. Foreignization, on the other hand, means taking the reader over to the source text and in turn to the foreign culture, making him or her see the differences. Domestication tries to repress cultural differences and adopt a transparent and fluent style as well as a method of reader's immediate intelligibility while foreignization attempts to recognize those differences and allow them to shape cultural discourses in the target language and eschews fluency for a more heterogeneous mix of discourses. The two strategies differ from each other not only at the linguistic level, but also at the cultural level, and as such they differ from the traditional translation methods of literal translation and free translation.Eugene A. Nida advocates functional equivalence and lays stress on the reader's responses to the original and the translated version. In his mind, domestication is an indispensable means to avoid linguistic and cultural conflict so as to achieve effective intercultural communication in translation. Besides, he emphasizes on the communicative function of translation. In his translation theory Nida puts forward"dynamic equivalence", which is defined as"the degree to which the receptors of message in the receptor language respond to it in substantially the same manner as the receptors in the source language."(Nida, 1964) However, Venuti advocates"resistance translation"(Venuti, 1995) in order to develop a new theory and practice of translation to signify the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text.The choice of the two strategies in translation practice is not arbitrary but constrained and entailed by various factors from text type, translator, reader, to ideology, morality etc. By analyzing the foreignizing or domesticating inclination in different text types in particular social situations we can illustrate the dynamic unity of foreignization and domestication. And we can see that, with the increasingly frequent contact of cultures and the development of cultural diffusion, it is quite likely for the SL (source language) culture-oriented principle to become more and more acceptable. This thesis is divided into four chapters.Chapter one mainly introduces these two translation strategies, their advocates, theoretical basis, the debates on them and their functions in cultural communication.Chapter Two analyzes the factors conditioning the use of these two strategies. Several factors affect the choice of these two strategies such as the translator, text type and the reader's acceptance.Chapter Three, as the main part, analyzes the features and the strategies for literary writings, treatises in humanities and social sciences and scientific and technical texts, with a view to proving that various text types involving different degree of cultural implications lead to varying emphasis on the employment of foreignization and/or domestication in their translation; which is elaborated by discussing the transference of different symbolic and pragmatic meanings between English and Chinese and the way of dealing with the images in some classical Chinese poems, culture-bound words, scientific and technical terms, brands and advertisements.The last part draws a conclusion that foreignization and domestication are dynamically united. It is possible for foreignizaiton to be the dominant method, or vice versa. And the priority of the two approaches varies depending on the types of texts to be translated, with literary translations generally preferring foreignization, and only when necessary resorting to the domesticating approach, since the ultimate goal of such translation is to learn from the source culture and give impetus to the cultural flourish of the target language.
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