On Domestication Or Foreignization In The Translation Of Contemporary Chinese Novels

With the rapid development of the opening-up progress, China’s cultural exchanges have entered a brand-new historic stage and the government has established its “Going-out” cultural strategy. Translation is playing a much more significant role in making China’s literary works accessible to non-Chinese readers and in promoting mutual understanding among nations and cultures in a globalized world. The translation of contemporary Chinese novels has aroused scholars’ interests.However, ideology, cultural hegemony and other elements have been paid too much attention but target readers’ acceptance has been neglected in the current studies. The mainstream praises highly of foreignizing translation in order to maintain and spread Chinese cultures. So the choice of foreignization and domestication seems to be a question that needs to be discussed.Taking Micheal Berry’ version of Huo Zhe as an example, this thesis employs the theory of translation ethics and analyzes the source and the target text from the following three aspects: the translator, target readers’ acceptance and the target text.Based on the translator’s view of translation, this thesis discusses the expressions which bear great cultural and linguistic differences and evaluates of the target text according to target readers’ acceptance. Finally, this thesis draws the conclusion that translators need to hold the ethics for being loyal to target readers and employ domestication in translating those will cause ambiguities and misunderstandings of contemporary Chinese novels in the current situation in order to meet the basic needof readability for target readers and better the way of the spread of contemporary Chinese literature in the western world.