Foreignizing Tendency In Translating Contemporary Chinese Novels

Translation is a cross-cultural communication activity. Meanwhile, translation is also a process of making choice between two translation strategies:foreignization and domestication. Yu Hua is a representative of contemporary Chinese novelists. His novels have been translated into many languages and have great influence both at home and abroad. So this thesis chooses the English version To Live as an example to analyze how Michael Berry employs foreignization in the translation.This thesis starts with the concept of foreignization and emphasizes the concern of Western and Chinese scholars upon foreignizing strategy. Then the author of this thesis takes the version To Live for analysis. In the translation, Berry adopts transliteration, literal translation and extratextual gloss to reproduce the features of the original. The linguistic forms, especially rhetoric features such as simile and metaphor, are translated honestly. And Berry also employs foreignizing strategy in translating culture-specific words and idioms to retain the necessary cultural features. In addition, Berry's version preserves the style of the original writer, to show his respect to the original works and Chinese culture.Finally, this thesis gives the reasons why foreignizing strategy is suitable to translate contemporary Chinese novels, and reaches a conclusion that because of foreignizing strategy's role in reproducing the language features of the original text and retaining the cultural elements foreignization will become a tendency in translating contemporary Chinese novels.