Exposition Of Domestication And Foreignization In English Idioms Translation: A Memetic Perspective

Being specific compositions in the process of culture development, idioms are regarded as difficult issues in the communication between different languages and cultures. Due to their conciseness in form and colorfulness in meaning, they are widely used by a large number of people in our daily life. However, the translation of idioms is not as easy as we think. To help readers have a better understanding of this language form and consequently the culture of foreign countries, plenty of translators have long been making great effort in finding the proper strategies in the translation of English idioms. Nowadays, many of them realize that the translation of idioms involves not only the exchange of language but also the transfer of culture since translation is in essence intercultural communication. To deal with the dilemma, translation theorists have proposed two kinds of cultural strategies-domestication and foreignization, which have gained much attention. Domestication and foreignization do not contradict with each other, but are two different choices in translating idioms.As a basic unit of cultural replication and transmission, meme has its power in explaining the two cultural strategies in idioms translation. The study about meme-the memetics now, is accepted by more and more theorists. This paper makes the utmost effort to analyze the domestication and foreignization strategies in idioms translation from this relatively new cultural transmission theory:an evolutionary theory about human culture, which studies the evolutionary models of language exchange based on the concept of meme. It provides a brand new perspective in comprehensively probing the two cultural strategies in idioms translation. After comparing and analyzing the different translations of idioms, the author ultimately makes a conclusion that both domestication and foreignization played an important role in idioms translation, the transmission of meme makes us flexibly deal with the source language text by means of these two translation strategies. As a matter of fact, domestication and foreignization is in essence the transmission of successful memes. And domestication is a necessary phase at the early age of meme transmission, while foreignization is the inevitable need and trend of meme transmission. Therefore, domestication paves the way for foreignization. Foreignization will become the main stream and domestication will continue to play an important role in idioms translation.