Domestication In Legal Translation

There are two translation strategies in translation: domestication and foreignization. Domestication is target-culture-oriented translation in which the unusual expressions are turned into some familiar ones so as to make the translated texts understandable and easy for the target readers. Foreignization is source-culture-oriented translation which intends to preserve the cultural and linguistic diversity so as to retain the foreignness of the source culture. The debates over domestication and foreignization have been the topic in translation circle for a long time. In the western countries, domesticating strategy have been made use of at least ancient Rome and foreignizing strategy in translation was firstly put forward in German culture by the philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher. In China, the discussion about domestication and foreignization can trace back to the translation of sutra. During that time, the debate over wen and zhi was the earliest confrontation between domestication and foreignization.As the growth in international trade has increased, the demand for legal translation, the status of legal translation is becoming more important than we thought before. No matter what kind of legal text is translated, this translation activity is a practice that stands at the crossroads of translation strategies. To some extent, the quality of legal translation also depends on the choice of translation strategies. The importance of translation strategy urges the author to make researches into translation strategy.The present paper aims to describe and analyze domestication and it focuses on the application of it to legal translation. Firstly, the present paper lists the views about domestication and foreignization at home and abroad and introduces the western and Chinese scholars who advocate domestication as well as their theories, so that domestication can be proved to be scientific. Secondly, the author links theory with practice and applies domestication into legal translation. The practicability of domestication in legal translation is proved from the lexical level and syntactical level. Lastly, the present paper points out that there is no absolute domestication and foreignization in legal translation, the relationship between these two strategies is complementary.