A Cross-cultural Study Of Translation Strategies In The Scholars

Wu Jingzi,one of the greatest novelists in Qing dynasty,and the greatest satirist with fruitful works in poetry and history.He had created many works.The quantity was huge,and the process of writing ran through his entire life.In a word,he was a versatile man.There was no doubt that The Scholars as a profound masterpiece laid the foundation for its literary status.It had formed the basis of satiric novels in ancient China.Moreover,it always had showed a significant effect on the latter.Hence,The Scholars had enjoyed a high popularity all over the world in the past.Then,it was translated into English by the famous translator Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang and was printed in Changsha city Hu nan province in1996.For my own part,The Scholars is not only a great novel,but also as an encyclopedia that narrates Chinese cultural features in daily life,and it shows us a series of terrific scenes.Apart from appreciation,we find out differences between western and eastern tradition.How to translate them into authentic English and make abroad readers feel familiar,and then let them enjoy reading and understand these differences?The answers are presented in the chapter four.Quite a few cases are listed to answer these questions.Lastly,we communicate successfully and without misunderstanding.That’s the reason to choose this book.In light of my research on translation of The Scholars in a lot of references,it is concluded that Chinese scholars have mainly explored it from two aspects,namely translator’s subjectivity and readers’reception.Both of them involve domestication and foreignization theory studies.Domestication and foreignization are put forward from（Venuti L.1995）in his work——The Translator’s Invisibility.The former originated from seventeenth-century England,three representatives of which are Sir John Denham,John Dryden and Alexander Fraser Tytler.All of them advocated the fluent strategies which were aimed at meeting the readers’requirement,and adopted domestication in the process of original texts translation.The latter was raised in Germany in the early 19^thcentury,three representatives of which were Friedrich Schleiermacher,Francis Newman and William Morris.They declared that foreignization would bring the readers an understanding and enjoyment of the author as correct and complete as possible.For the application of translation theory,we drew lessons from Hans Vermeer’s skopos theory and“faithfulness,expressiveness and elegance”of Yan Fu.We followed one of skopos theory’s principles:The communicative purpose principle of translation.Under its guidance,the thesis adopted multiple translation strategies flexibly and diversely,and melted them into an integrated text.The purpose is not only let the target readers to understand the original thoughts and connotations but also experience exotic culture completely.It may be a whole different experience which seems being there to feel extraneous civilization.Next,it obtained the goal of communication between reader and author.Besides,“faithfulness,expressiveness and elegance”of Yan Fu has already embodied on aspect of faithfulness both from thoughts and connotations between original and translation based on the Chinese-English cases of The Scholars studying by the thesis.However,it is no longer merely word-for-word translation just for loyalty to text’s style and words‘meaning.Meanwhile,it is not unrestricted in order to turn elegance yet.This thesis main applied domestication and foreignization translation strategy to explain differences among Chinese-English culture and folk-customs.Ample cases are the highlights of the thesis.We have listed a lot of them and divided them into seven categories from cross-cultural perspectives of The Scholars.Studies of illustrations include Chinese texts,Chinese pin yin,English literal translation and free translation,decipher details.The thesis is rooted from English version of The Scholars and explored the English version from two aspects of domestication and foreignization translate strategies under the guidance of skopos theory and theory of“Faithfulness,Expressiveness and Elegance”of Yan Fu.In the process of viewing and studying,we find out disparity and differences between theories’standards and English version’s presentation.At last,the paper was looking forward to offer advice for studies of domestication and foreignization on Chinese-English translation in future.