Foreignizing Practices In Love In A Fallen City

In The Translator s Invisibility:A History of Translation published in 1995, Lawrence Venuti points out that fluent English and an invisible translator have become literary cannons prevalent in works translated into English. However. Love in a Fallen City translated by Karen S. Kingsbury from Qingcheng Zhilian is different. On one hand, the translator adopts a foreignizing translation strategy to reproduce as many language features of the original text as possible; on the other hand, the usually invisible translator becomes visible as the translator's name is noticeable shown under the name of the author in the book cover, which can remind readers of the work's identity as a translation. These phenomena are unusual. And this study intends to find out the actual situation behind these superficial phenomena.This thesis takes advantage of Venuti's theories of "domestication" and "foreignization" and his "invisible" translator theory, adopts case study as its research methodology, and focuses on analyzing two questions:whether the translator's translation strategy conforms to her intention, and how much and what attention has been given to the translator.The case study consists of four steps. First, the translator's translation intention exhibited in her interview and in her own "Introduction" in the NYRB book is analyzed. Second, the source text and the target text are compared to find signs of foreignizing and domesticating practices. Third, paratext that shows the information about the translator in the NYRB book is investiageted. Fourth, data collected from Amazon, Goodreads and Literature Resource Center in GALE are analyzed. Comparing results of step one and step two, it is found that the translator's strategy conforms to her intention. Yet by analyzing results of step three and step four, it is clear that though the translator is visible to some degree in this NYRB book, readers, including the media, experts and ordinary readers, still pay little attention to the translator and the book's translation identity.