A Contrastive Study Of Two Chinese Versions Of Jane Eyre From The Perspectives Of Domestication And Foreignization

Literary translation has been playing a significant role in cross-cultural exchanges. Since long ago, scholars and translators in China have been debating over the strategies in literary translation. Up to now, however, there has been no agreement.Both domestication and foreignization, whose initiator dates back to a German scholar named Schleiermacher, account for two important strategies in literary translation. It is, however, Laurence Venuti, an American scholar, who put forward domestication and foreignization in his book The Translator's Invisibility-A History of Translation, in which he termed them as"domesticating method"and"foreignizing method". Domestication and foreignization are termed specifically as"a domesticating method, an ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to target-language cultural values, bringing the author back home, and a foreignizing method, an ethno-deviant pressure on those values to register the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text, sending the reader abroad."(Venuti 2004 20). In the 1970s last century, advocated by its representatives such as Katharina Reiss, Hans J Vemeer and Christian Nord, the functionalist skopos theory was born in Germany. This theory"has been one of the most powerful translation theories in the west"(杨晓荣,2004) and"the most influential translation approach in Germany since the 1970s"(谭载喜,2004:255). This theory holds that"the skopos principle is the most superior in translation"(旷章红等,2009) and"the translation skopos decides the translation strategy"(Reise & Vemeer, 1984), from which one can notice that the translation skopos has the final say in translation practices instead of considering adopting domestication or foreignization before getting down to translation. This paper, based on the functionalist skopos theory, is going to make a contrastive study of two Chinese versions of Jane Eyre, and try to analyze the application of domestication and foreignization, in which the appropriate and impropriate application of the two translation strategies will be under in-depth discussion.