Cultural Difference And Its Significance To E-C Translation

Against the backdrop of the irresistible trend of globalization and multiculturalism, dominant cultures are inevitably penetrating into other subordinate cultures. To prevent themselves from being assimilated, subordinate cultures are making painstaking efforts in carrying on dialogue with the dominant, in which they are gradually aware of the importance of the maintenance of cultural identity. In translation academia, this trend is saliently reflected in the strategy of foreignization which is more beneficial in maintaining ST cultural differences compared with domestication. This thesis, by analyzing critically on Venuti’s notion of foreignization, suggests that this strategy is supposed to retain ST cultural differences creatively and enrich the TL language vigorously rather than go against target language culture deliberately. Meanwhile, the feasibility of the strategy of domestication in idiom translation is challenged by stating some illusion of translation equivalence and advocacy of meeting equivalence proposed by Nida and other translators. What’s more, more interdisciplinary theories such as cultural studies, critical discourse analysis, reader’s horizon of expectation and reader-response criticism, together with the illustration of case studies of C-E idiom translation, are introduced in the further studies of this strategy, in the hope that the application of foreignization could promote mutual understanding and communication among different cultures by maintaining cultural differences.