Foreignizing Strategy In Translation Of Cultural Blanks

Language and culture are closely related to each other, language is not only a part of culture but also a carrier of culture. Translation is a bicultural communication rather than a bilingual transformation. Due to the social and natural factors, each culture has its own distinctive features. Different cultures have a lot in common, so cultural blanks appear as the consequence of the rich diversity of different cultures. Therefore, in the process of translation, some cultural elements of the source language are difficult to understand by target-language readers. Due to the lack of cultural correspondence between the source and target languages, some of those elements could hardly be transferred into the target-language, which is called cultural blanks proposed by Russian translation theorist I.Q. Sorokin.An overview of both the Chinese and the Western translation tradition would find that domesticating translation has achieved a dominant position. Most translators prefer to translate cultural blanks with domesticating strategy. Lawerence Venuti’s The Translator’s Invisibility:A History of Translation was published in1995. He advocates that translators should break the convention of target language. Venuti asserts that foreignizing translation may become an effective way to resist cultural imperialism and racism. He tries to adopt resistant translation to reject domesticating translation in order to keep the cultural elements in source language, destroying cultural hegemony of Anglo-American countries.As the main theoretical support to this research, Venuti’s theory will be applied. A lot of examples from Love in a Fallen City, Peony Pavilion, Fortress Besieged will be analyzed to instruct the four methods to translate cultural blanks:literal translation, literal translation and annotation, transliteration, transliteration and annotation. What’s more, the author chooses some practical examples, such as proverbs, idioms and Chinese-characterized words, to justify the possibility of foreignizing translation.All in all, foreignizing translation adopted in dealing with cultural blanks successfully extends the aesthetic reading horizon of target-language readers, registering and spreading the feature of source culture, promoting multi-national communication.