The Application Of Foreignization To College English Translation Teaching

In the era of globalization, China is in an urgent need of more qualified translators, and translation teaching plays an important role in cultivating and producing qualified translators. According to a survey (Luo Xuanmin, 2002), more than 80% of western classical works (excluding literature) in China have been translated by non-foreign language specialized scholars and over 90% students in colleges are non-foreign language majors. It is self-evident that translation teaching in non-foreign language institutes has much to do with translation market today and tomorrow.However, in college English translation teaching, teachers tend to emphasize translation knowledge rather than translation competence. And translation is more used to make a comparison between source language and target language. But translation involves language as well as culture. To some extent, translation is the exchange between two cultures. On the one hand, language is a part of culture and cannot develop without culture. On the other hand, language is the carrier of culture. Only by acknowledging the relationship between language and culture can we understand the real meaning of translation teaching.The development of society in different times sets varying requests to the translation teaching. Globalization and cultural pluralism turn out to be the tendency in the development of modern society. Because of globalization, people from different cultures are communicating with each other in every aspect of life. The exchange and cultural communication among different nations is becoming increasingly frequent. Therefore, one of the purposes of translation is to promote cultural communication. And this trend is most prominent in the strategy of foreignization in translation academic field. Translation acts as a bridge in different cultures. So it is used not only to convey the meaning of the source text, but also to transfer and preserve the original cultural meaning. With more and deeper cultural communication and cooperation among different nations, the translation receivers have learned to accept foreign flavor and even look forward to meeting with foreign features. So it is necessary and feasible to apply foreignization to the translation course. Foreignization aims to maintain the foreign features of the original texts and highlight the differences of source language and culture. By foreignization, the real foreigness of a source culture can be transmitted to the target readers.A great progress has been made in the theoretical study of foreignization both at home and abroad, but the relevant empirical study is rather limited. As a result, this thesis aims to test the feasibility and validity of the application of foreignization to translation classes. By learning and using the foreignizing strategy, the students are expected to enhance their cultural awareness, respect and understand the importance of cultural differences, laying a good foundation for better translation practice in the future.The teaching experiment was carried out with four procedures: 1) Pre-test. The pre-test was conducted among all the sophomores of Shandong Institute of Trade and Union's Administration Cadres and aimed to select two proximal-level classes as the subjects of the experiment, one as the comparison group and the other the experiment group. 2) Application. The foreignization was applied to the translation teaching in the experiment group, while in the comparison group, foreignization and its relevant information was not provided. 3) Post-test. The post-test was carried out in both the comparison and the experiment group at the end of the experiment in order to test the feasibility and validity of the application of foreignization to translation classes. 4) Data Analysis. The data and results of the pretest and the post-test were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively in order to check up the effectiveness of the research.According to the result analysis of the experiment, the students in the experiment group have changed their original belief that translation only means correct grammar and language equivalents between two languages, and they began to respect and understand the cultural differences. And class observation showed that students in the experiment group were more active and creative in translation practices and tended to finish their translation homework in time and with more interest. Moreover, the interview showed that the strategy of foreignization was well accepted by most students of the experiment group, and believed to be able to enhance students' translation competence. Thereby, foreignization turned out to be feasible and effective when applied to college English translation teaching.In spite of the positive results, the study has its limitations. Some proposals for further study were put forward in the end.