Dialectical View On Venuti's Foreignization Theory

Venuti's foreignization theory, with a unique cultural political perspective, places translation study in a grand framework with background elements such as culture, politics, history and society. This makes people rethink translation and obtain new cognition.This thesis firstly retrospect on foreignization concerning its origin, development, transformation and present studies at home and abroad, which leads to introduction of Venuti's foreignization theory. Foreignization and domestication had gone through a long history before the cultural turn of translation studies in last century helped them transform from translation methods to translation strategy. Venuti contributed a lot to this transformation with his unique theory. Through disclosing substance of translators'invisibility, namely inequality between dominating cultures and dominated cultures, Venuti criticizes domesticating translation which features transparence and fluency in appearance and substantial effacing cultural foreignness, and constructs foreignization theory which highlights foreignness of source-language culture. While in China, the debate over foreignization and domestication starting 1980s'is the theoretical reflection of transformation from translation method to translation strategy.As a controversial theory, Venuti's foreignization theory origins and develops in Anglo-American culture which bears a tradition of domesticating translation. After analyzing cultural, social, and historical backgrounds and philosophical base of Venuti's foreignization theory, this thesis introduces the main contents of Venuti's theory which includes critiques on translators'invisibility, challenge to fluent translation and strategy for foreignizing translation. Venuti upgrades translation studies to cultural political level and probes into translation and its ties to economy, politics and society. The broad horizon makes translation studies associated with establishing cultural identities, protecting cultural ecology and resisting cultural hegemony, and raises the statuses of translation and translators. Introduction of Venuti's theory promoted the debate over foreignization and domestication, and endowed this debate with an escalation from linguistic level to cultural level.In its main body, this thesis probes into highlights and limitations of Venuti's theory illustrated with some translation cases in modern and contemporary Chinese history. The Holy Bible (Chinese Union Version) brought the popularity of vernacular Chinese and"influenced vocabulary and syntax of Chinese language. More importantly, it influenced almost all important Chinese writers. Thanks to their abundant creation and translation in vernacular Chinese language, modern Chinese language was laid a foundation and the modern transformation of Chinese language was completed."(�'�骁华2003:38) Zhang Ailing translated her masterpiece The Golden Cangue into English a few times for American readers."Her foreignizing translation is purposed to attract foreign readers with Oriental culture. It turned out, however, that this kind of translation was a great burden to readers."(游晟2011:50)This translation work was given a cold shoulder for a long period. It is not ideal for foreignizing translation to establish national identities of the dominated culture in the dominating culture.Limitations of foreignization theory resulted in Venuti's introspection."Translation strategies can be defined as'foreign'or'domesticating'only in relation to specific cultural situation, specific moments in the changing reception of a foreign literature."(Venuti 2008: 272)."Because foreignizing translation is also to be realized in the reception language culture. So to some extent foreignization translation is domestic translation, and there is no absolute boundary between these two concepts which even overlap to some extent……foreignizing translation has to apply domestic language……it is important to localize the translated concepts"(郭建中2009: 35-36). This thesis analyses a quotation from Yan Fu's translation of Evolution and Ethics, which was translated in ancient Chinese language and of which the advanced concepts were"localized". This kind of translation catered for the literati and officialdom in feudal China and made them pioneers for spreading thoughts of"self-strengthening and the preservation of the race". This thesis points out that Yan Fu's translation is domesticating in the linguistic level and also foreignizing in the perspective of transmitting thoughts as a culture strategy.Generally speaking, in the process of transmitting foreignness, foreignization has its limitations while domestication also has its advantages. Flexible adoption of translation strategy in relation to specific cultural political context is in better service of transmitting foreignness in the cultural exchange. This viewpoint is proposed in favor of dialectical unification of foreignization and domestication. The end of the thesis sees a dialectical analysis of Venuti's introspection on (self-deconstruction of) his foreignization theory, and suggests that his introspection is a return to reality from minoritizing translation of"elitism". His introspection reveals that translation study is supposed to return to reality and instruct practice.