The Translator’s Visibility In The English Translation Of Qingchengzhilian

"Foreignization translation" was proposed by Lawrence Venuti in his book The Translator’s Invisibility-A History of Translation in1995. Based on the criticism of traditional translation method of domestication, foreignization translation aims to resist the British and American cultural hegemony and to fight against imperialism thus making the cultural otherness of the foreign text manifested in translation and retaining the cultural diversity so that the target language readers can have a better comprehension of the original culture. The theory has been a hot issue among scholars at home and abroad since this theory was put forward by Venuti and inspired a new round of discussion about the translator’s position and translation strategy. We all know that there are three main bodies-The author, the translator and the reader involved in translation and among which the translator is one of the most important element. However, in Venuti’s opinion translator’s status is inferior to the author even to the original work in the western countries which in fact not only causes the ethnocentrism and cultural imperialism and leads to the marginalization of the translator’s status and the inequality in the process of cultural exchange but also threatens the development of the diversity of the English world culture, so we need to make the translator visible in the translation.This paper tries to analyze the manifestation of translator’s visibility in Chinese writer Eileen Chang’s Love in a Fallen City translated by American translator Karen. S. Kingsbury with Venuti’s foreignization translation and discusses its influence on the acceptability of translation. The first chapter of the thesis introduces the background of the research and states the research purpose and significance of the thesis. The second chapter reviews the relevant situation of the theory. In the third chapter the thesis spells out Venuti’s visibility theory in detail and its manifestation in translation. The fourth chapter is the body of the thesis in this chapter the Chinese female writer Eileen Chang’s novel Qingchengzhilian as a case will be analyzed from the perspective of translator’s visibility-the selection of materials and the translation strategy to echo Venuti’s theory. Through the analysis, the thesis proved its point of view and concluded that in the process of translating Eileen Chang’s Qingchengzhilian, the translator Karen S. Kingsbury played active role in material selection and the choice of translation strategies and highlighted the identity of the translator. At the same times she not only transmitted the content and the connotation of the original quite well but also successfully gave a good presentation of resisting culture hegemony. Finally the thesis points out the readers’ acceptance of work also fully proved the feasibility of this theory thus providing a good example for the future translation study and practice. In a word, the translator’s visibility in Love in a Fallen City has a positive meaning in satisfying the appreciating the alien cultural needs of the readers, retaining and transmitting the features of the original language, promoting multi-national cultures’ equal communication and keep the development of the different world culture. But just as the thesis mentions at the end of the paper, duo to the limitation of the author the research on Venuti’s foreignizing translation strategy is limited. The thesis can only be helpful for other researchers to do research on translation strategy and practice.