Domestication And Foreignization Strategies And Goethe Mode In "romain Rolland Music Notes" The Application Of The Translation

Goethe, in his work Translations, discusses three kinds of translation:The first, called a plain prose translation, acquaints us with the foreign country on our own terms; the second one leans to target language, and depends more on the translator’s own peculiar understanding and taste; the final and highest of the three calls for achieving perfect identity with the original, so that the one does not exist instead of the other but in the other’s place. Such kind of translation comes close to an interlinear version and greatly facilitates our understanding of the original. In this process happens transplantation, that is, the target and original language converge into a new point by absorbing each other’s essence, so that a new target language containing original characters is formed.Goethe’s translation idea to a great extent connects with the modern theory of adaptation (or domestication) and alienation (or foreignization). The former emphasizes the part of readers and aims at localizing the translation language, while the latter backlashes this opinion and promotes that the reader should have access to the original cultural background and the original writer’s articulation, instead of the translator’s.However, both of the two methods focus on how to express the content of source language correctly and to what extent the target language should reproduce the characteristics of the original text. No matter how different the opinions held by Eugene A. Nida, Lawrence Venuti and Hugo Friedrich are, all of their theories still remain in the terrain of the final and highest of the three methods of Goethe. It is true that Goethe prefers the alienation, but his alienation highlights on the convergence, endeavoring to show the reader’s a much clearer source text. Also, he resists the free creation by the translator and addresses the loyalty to the original culture and language.This thesis explores a lot on the connection between Goethe’s translation idea and the two methods of domestication and alienation, basically relating to the analysis of my own translation works of Romain Roland’s Essays on Music, and also an earlier version translated by Leng Shan and Dai Hong. What’s more, it also probes into some aspects of music theory and history, the understanding of which greatly influences how we translate music literatures.