Domesticating Vs. Foreignizing--On Literary Translation From Cross-cultural Perspective

With the globalization of different cultures, more and more literary scholars have been paying more attention to the relationship between language and culture and the great effect on language and culture brought about by cross-cultural translation.Each language group has its own culturally specific features. Whether language is a component of culture or not, the two notions of language and culture are undoubtedly inseparable. A contrastive cultural analysis between English and Chinese reveals that born to different cultural backgrounds such as natural environment, religion, philosophy and ethics, custom and historical event and mythology, people think and speak differently, manifesting in the following aspects: different perspectives, same ideas in different images, difference in register and lexical gaps. Cultural implications pose important and difficult linguistic gaps for translation to overcome. Hence, translators are often faced with the problem of how to treat the cultural aspects implicit in a source text or how to convey these aspects with the most appropriate technique in the target language.Schleiermacher asked in 1813 who should be "moved" in translation, whether the translator should leave the writer alone as much as possible and move the reader toward the writer, or he should leave the reader alone as much as possible and moves the writer toward the reader. In 1995, Venuti further explained the two approaches as domesticating translation in which the translator renders the source in the recipients' concepts and world-view and foreignizing translation in which the translator requires that the recipients stretch to understand the concepts and world-view of the source. A review over the statements by both Chinese and Western scholars on this question reveals that this two contrasting approaches have always been under discussion and now dominate much theoretical writing in translating culture-specific texts abundant in local color.Domesticating and foreignizing translations are different from free and literal translations. The discussion over foreignizing and domesticating has moved its way out of the limitation of the ancient literal and free translation on the linguistic level to a level concerning as broad as with religions, poetic style, world views and some other cultural contexts. Whether a translation is foreignizing or domesticating can only be judged at a certain point of time with reference to its contemporary cultural context. A translation text that sounds very foreign to one generation may sound fairly natural or even local to a later generation of readership. That means foreignizing and domesticating are both dynamic concepts. However, we need only to compare a translation text to the source text to find if a literal or a free translation strategy is used. And that is to say, literal and free are static concepts.Both of the two approaches are necessary in that a domestic approach is effective when dealing with texts different from the target language grammatically, i.e., mainly on the phonetic, formal and stylistic level and a foreignizing approach better preserves the original flavour as for texts carrying rich cultural implication. Meanwhile, each of the two has its limitation in practice. An over-domesticated translation may sacrifice large amount of cultural implication of the original, while an over-foreignizing translation may lower the readability of the version, and the result is that translation readers cannot get the same feeling when reading the version as original readers get when reading the original. As far as literary translation is concerned, the translator should try to adopt a foreignizing strategy. He should trust readers in their capability of negotiating the meaning of seemingly obscure spots by drawing on their own experience, as long as his foreignized version does not sound too hard and frustrate the reader to the point of communication breakdown. After all, psychologically, men are invariably motivated by the desire to pursue novelties. There are a...