A Study Of Foreignization And Domestication In Translation From The Perspective Of Skopostheorie

A translation strategy refers to the method used to deal with the cultural differences between source language and target language. There are two basic translation strategies, namely, foreignization and domestication. The former one means that the translator should retain the peculiarity of the source language as much as possible; the latter one asks the translator to try his best to bring the target language culture into the cognitive scope of the target language readers. Scholars have been arguing about which one to use in the process of translating.Skopostheorie, put forward by the German scholar Hans J. Vermeer in the late1970s, is the most important part of translation theories from the Functionalist School. It stresses that the translation should take the expectable function as its skopos on the basis of the analysis on the source text, and chooses the best approach. As a great breakthrough to the traditional equivalence theory, skopostheorie provides a new perspective to translation practice and research.Translation is a kind of cross-cultural communication, in other words, it is a purposeful behavior for human beings. And skopostheorie, with "skopos" rule as its most significant rule, may provide a new attempt in the choice of translation strategies, namely, to see whether the version has adequately achieved the skopos of translation.Ah Q Zheng Zhuan, with strong Chinese national flavor, is the novel which has won universal praise and enjoyed great popularity in all of Lu Xun’s works. It takes an extremely significant position in the history of Chinese contemporary literature. It contains many cultural elements which are unique to China and very different to western culture. It also reflects various kinds of cultural appearance in the then Chinese society.This paper aims to make a systematic and comparative analysis between the source text and its two English versions of Ah O Zheng Zhuan, one by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, the other by William A. Lyell, from the perspective of three basic principles of Skopostheorie which includes the skopos rule, the coherence rule and the fidelity rule. It intends to ascertain the translation strategies adopted by translators in order to achieve their respective translation skopos, and demonstrate the core viewpoint of skopostheorie—the translation skopos decides the translation methods. The Yangs’version is maximumly close to the original text in the choice of words and sentence structures. The implication of the words in it can accurately convey the content and style of the source text. While in Lyell’s version, the dialogue translation is extremely vivid and it has distinct color of modern oral American English. The wording and phrasing of its writing is flexible and easy to accept, and it makes readers find everything fresh and new. Both of the two versions are excellent, and they have made a great contribution to convey the splendid Chinese culture. Through the research, it can be found that, the strategy of foreignization and domestication are both used in their respective versions in order to achieve their different translation skopos. However, the Yangs’version is foreignization prominent, while the Lyell’s version is domestication prominent.