Rethinking Venuti's Translation Theory

Since the 1970s, the cultural turn in translation academia makes the translation theorists pay more attention to the political, ideological and other cultural factors in translation. Lawrence Venuti's translation theory formed in the background of modernism and postcolonialism attracts more and more attention from translation academic. He criticizes the domesticating translation dominant in traditional translation theories and advocates the foreignness instead of sameness. He recommends foreignizing translation and calls for the visibility of the translator. Furthermore, his ethics of translation, that is, ethics of difference, ethics of sameness and ethics of location results in the ethical turn in translation studies. In China, the studies on Venuti's translation theory are fewer and among these studies, some criticism and evaluation are unreasonable. This paper aims at giving Venuti's translation theory a relatively reasonable evaluation after reading his theory.This paper first discusses the social background and its theoretical origin of Venuti's translation theory. Postcolonialism, cultural hegemony, deconstructionism and cultural turn exert great influence on Venuti's translation theory. Furthermore, Germanic heterogeneous thinking and Derrida's"deconstruction"directly result in the formation Lawrence Venuti's foreignizing translation. Then, it gives a relatively detailed description of Venuti's translation theory. After a general survey, it begins to rethink Venuti's translation theory and finds that there are some problems, such as, insufficiency in argumentation, violation of the law of identity and paradoxes. His ignorance of translations'readability, theory's narrow applicable scope, and weak power in resisting cultural hegemony in applying his theory still couldn't be ignored. Although there are some problems, Venuti's contributions to the improvement of the translator's status and vision's broadening in translation studies shouldn't be neglected. And the contributions to translation studies shouldn't be erased away.