A Critical Research Into Lawrence Venuti's Translation Theory

Venuti's translation theory has aroused interest of many translators. He criticizes the dominant domesticating translation and advocates foreignizing translation. Meanwhile, his foreignizing translation strategy challenges the prevailing fluent translation in Anglo-American culture.The critical analysis of Venuti's translation theory is to give some assistance to Chinese translation studies from the cultural perspective. The thesis analyzes the present position of Chinese culture in the world and generalizes that we cannot hold bias towards foreignization or domestication. The combination of the two strategies can avoid the extreme translation, and also is an optimization of Venuti's translation theory.This thesis consists of six parts. The first part is literature review, which shows how the canon of fluent translation is gradually consolidated in the western culture and how the foreignizing translation idea comes into being. The second part makes an introduction to Venuti's translation theory. In Venuti's opinion, the traditional domestication translation is in fact a kind of ethnocentric and cultural violence, while foreignization translation in English can resist this kind of violence by signifying the cultural and linguistic difference of the source text. The third part analyzes the social and cultural background and philosophical basis of Venuti's translation theory. The fourth part researches into his translation theory critically and points out its advantages and disadvantages. In the fifth part,the thesis presents the application conditions of Venuti's translation theory in China and at the same time points out its enlightenment to China's translation studies. And the last part is the conclusion of the thesis.With the increasing globalization goes on, the cultural communication between countries is enhanced. And Venuti's foreignizing translation idea will play an important role in promoting cultural communication among different countries.