Domestication And Foreignization In Zhang Ailing's Self-translation Of Her Fiction Jin Suo Ji

It is known to all that Zhang Ailing is one of the most renowned writers of the 20th century in China's literary world and one of the best female writers in China's literary history. However, what is rarely known is that she is also a brilliant bilingual writer and translator between Chinese and English. Zhang Ailing did a great deal of intralingual translation and interlingual translation in her life. She translated not only others'works, but also her own works. Jin Suo Ji is just a representative of her self-translation.After the review and analysis of previous literature, the author of this paper found that rare research has been done about domestication and foreignization in Zhang Ailing's self-translation of Jin Suo Ji, which aroused the author's interest to do this study. Domestication and foreignization are two opposite strategies of literary translation. Domestication advocates that the understanding of the target language readers should be put in the first place, so the translation should be close to the target language readers as much as possible, while foreignization considers the understanding of the source language readers first and asks the translator to retain the foreign flavor of the source language text. On the basis of a review of the domestication and foreignization theory and a comparison between Jin Suo Ji and its English counterpart The Golden Cangue, the author of this thesis explores in detail the application of these two translation strategies from two aspects in Zhang Ailing's self-translation process with several examples respectively. What's more, the author goes on to dig into the study, trying to analyze the reasons why Zhang Ailing chose domestication or foreignization in her translation from two perspectives. It is hoped that this study can make some contribution to the research into Zhang Ailing's self-translation of Jin Suo Ji.This paper is made up of five chapters. Chapter one is an overall introduction to this paper. Chapter two is the part of literature review, in which the author not only introduces the translation theories used in this paper-domestication and foreignization, and their relationship with liberal translation and literal translation, but also makes an overview about the research in domestication and foreignization both abroad and at home. Chapter three is about the studies of Zhang Ailing's self-translation of Jin Suo Ji, in order to show the originality of this paper. Chapter four is the main part of this paper. Based on the theoretical background presented previously, the author does a case study into domestication and foreignization in Zhang Ailing's self-translation of Jin Suo Ji. The concrete analysis is conducted on two levels—the linguistic level and the cultural level. And each level is further divided into smaller aspects. The author finally gets the conclusion that Zhang Ailing chose foreignization as her main translation strategy. Then the possible reasons for her preference are further discussed. Chapter five is a conclusion of the whole paper, which includes the major findings of the study as well as the limitations of the study and some suggestions for further research of this type.