The Domestication And Foreignization In The English Translation Of Chinese Classics From Memetic Perspective

Chinese classics is the national cultural treasures of our country as well as theembodiment of Chinese traditional culture of five thousand years. The translation ofChinese classics not only enriches the human cultural diversity, but also enables thepeople to relocate and refresh the understanding of Chinese culture in heterogeneouscivilizations. Professor Wang Rongpei mentioned in his book English Translation ofChinese Classics that two basic strategies applied into the translation of Chineseclassics were domestication and foreignization. First put forward by Dawkins,“meme” is a new replicator alike “gene”. Memetics is a newly-developing culturalevolution theory. Since domestication and foreignization strategies are both related tothe rendering of the culture, memes, as the basic units of cultural transmission, musthave certain explanatory power for the phenomenon of domestication andforeignization in the process of translation. From the perspective of memetics, theEnglish translation of Chinese classics is actually the process of spreading the Chinesecultural memes to the western meme pool. Based on the transmission of Confucianculture memes in Mencius, the four-stage process of meme replication is revealed,namely assimilation, retention, expression and transmission. During this cross-culturalcommunication activity, the cultural environment has changed so that the Chinesecultural memes will mutate to secure a successful replication, which leads to thephenomenon of domestication and foreignization as a result. On the analysis of the replication process of the cultural memes “rén(仁)”、“yì(义)”、“xiào(孝)”、“qì(气)”, two different replication routes are demonstrated, whichturns out to be the internal cause of domestication and foreignization. Domesticationhelps memes seize the opportunity of survival in the foreign cultural environment,while the memes’ nature of ceaseless self-replication makes foreignization become thenecessary requirement and main trend in the translation. The author finally concludesthat domestication and foreignization are two inevitable stages during memereproduction, playing a significant role in the process. From the perspective ofmemetics, domestication plays important role in laying foundation for foreignizationduring the translation process, which finally will become the main trend in the Englishtranslation of Chinese classics due to the memes’ nature of ceaseless self-replication.