A Study On Foreignizing Strategy In Two Chinese Versions Of The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner, published in the United States in 2003, is Afghan-American writer Khaled Hosseini’s debut novel. The novel has been translated into many languages, and there are two Chinese versions, including Zhui Feng Zheng De Ren published in mainland, and Zhui Feng Zheng De Hai Zi published in Taiwan. Set against a backdrop in Afghanistan, the novel is full of unique Afghan traditions and Islamic customs. Faced with different choices of translation strategies in translating, the translator should take the cultural factors into full consideration in translating since the source text has such a strong exotic flavor. Lawrence Venuti, an Italian-American translation scholar, proposed foreignizing translation in his Translator’s Invisiblilty:A History of Translation in 1995. He holds the view that the translator should employ foreignizing translation strategy when he is translating a heavily culture-loaded text into a prevailing Anglo-American culture, to better promote the foreign culture.This thesis makes a comparative analysis of two Chinese versions of The Kite Runner, and it is found that the two Chinese translators adopt foreignizing translation strategies in different degrees and achieve different effects. It is found that foreignizing translation does not run counter to obscure language, and does not necessarily mean that the translation is not fluent, because foreignization is not only reflected at the language level, but also be reflected in the content of a text. The translators choosing a non-mainstream text is also a kind of foreignizing translation. In the process of translation, different translators would adopt different methods, leading to different degree of foreignization. Li Jihong’s version prefers to adopt domesticating translation strategy to meet the needs of the readers, by making the story easy to read at the expense of losing the original characteristics. Li Jingyi, on the contrary, intends to adopt foreignizing translation strategy to reserve cultural factors of the original as well as preserve high readability by using some auxiliary strategies. The two translators all use some auxiliary strategies to achieve foreignizaion in different degrees, which include explanatory additions(footnote and transliteration plus annotation), selective foreignizing(foreignizing only in the translation of important notions, and domesticating in the translation of less important ones). In summary, it is difficult to control the degree of foreignization, so translators should make a balance between retaining the cultural characteristics of the original and the readability of the translation.