An Investigation Into The Use Of Foreignization As A Strategy In The English Translation Of Chinese Culture-loaded Terms

Chinese culture-loaded terms refer to the words which are specific and have noequivalents in other cultures. For many years, researches on CCLTs have attractedgreat attention from both Western and Chinese translators and most Chinese scholarsbelieve that a majority of CCLTs are translated under the translation strategy offoreignization which was proposed by Venuti as the “an ethnocentric reduction of theforeign text to target-language cultural values, bring the author back home”. However,there is no evidence which has proved that most CCLTs which appear in periodicalswere translated under the strategy of foreignization, and it is still a vacancy as towhether native speakers of English accept those CCLTs.This research adopts both qualitative and quantitative methods, including aquestionnaire to analyze the CCLTs collected from China Today in2010,2011and2012. The CCLTs are collected in light of the definition and the three characteristicsproposed by Jin Huikang, and the foreignized CCLTs are selected according toVenuti’s definition of foreignization. Based on this, the number of each category ofCCLTs and CCLTs translated under the strategy of foreignization, as well as thenumber of CCLTs translated with each techniques of foreignization is counted andthen the data are analyzed. Besides, the acceptability of some translated samplesamong native speakers of English is investigated with the help of the questionnaire.From the results of the research, it is concluded that CCLTs translated under thestrategy of foreignization (72%) far outnumber those CCLTs translated under thestrategy of domestication (28%). And among five categories of CCLTs, the socialCCLTs take up the greatest percentage. In addition, there are four techniques appliedfor the translation of CCLTs, namely, transliteration, transliteration with explanation,literal translation and semi-transliteration and semi-literal translation. And among thefour techniques, transliteration accounts for the largest proportion. Moreover, it can befound from the result of the questionnaire that75%native speakers of English acceptover a half foreignized CCLTs, and half of the respondents are likely to use theforeignized CCLTs in the future.This research is the first attempt so far to investigate36volumes of such anEnglish magazine as China Today for the status quo of foreignization anddomestication as translation strategies and at the same time combine it with aquantitative method, including a questionnaire. Therefore, this research is expected to provide a new angle for later researchers who are interested in the study offoreignization as a strategy for the translation of CCLTs. And some insights both totranslators and translation theorists are expected to be provided. The quantitativemethod of research in foreignization may also provide some reference to furtherresearchers on the translation of CCLTs.