Aesthetics Of Reception And Foreignization In Literary Translation

As two basic strategies in translation, domestication and foreignization has always been the focus of scholars. In China's modern translation history, the domestication has, for a long time played a dominant role except for the fifteen or sixteen years after May the Fourth Movement. However, things are changing. Under the influence of western translation theories, especially since the introduction of aesthetics of reception, scholars start to rethink domestication and foreignization, and many of them start to support foreignization.The both sides have their own theory basis. Nida, as the representative of domestication, proposes the concept of"natural equivalence"; whereas Venuti, the representative of foreignization, proposes the concept of"resistancy"in translation. In Chinese translation theories, Fu Lei's"approximation in spirits"and Qian Zohngshu's"transformation"are the representatives of domestication, while Lu Xun's"faithfulness at the cost of fluency"is a main representative of foreignization.Among the previous translation theories, many are author-centered and text-centered, thus some impractical theories appear, such as"equivalence"and"approximation", etc. In the 1960s, on the basis of hermeneutics and phenomenology, reception aesthetic was established, and its points of view provided translation studies with new theoretical angles and approaches. It is of great significance to translation studies.In these author-centered translation theories, the text which is translated by the translator is regarded as the same as the original text. However, from the perspective of aesthetics of reception, the literary work is only the first text, whereas the one that has been comprehended and interpreted is the real aesthetic object, namely, the second text. Translator, as a special reader, translates the second text, which is one of the many approximations of the original text. As the text has many gaps, blanks and intermediacy which wait for the readers to fill by themselves, and different readers fill them differently, therefore the target readers will not appreciate the translated text as the original readers appreciate the original text. And thus the concept of equivalence is not applicable.Before they enter a text, as a matter of fact, readers bring their own world views, social experience and certain aesthetic standard, namely, the"horizon of expectations", which is subdivided into directed expectation and creative expectation. The work cannot be considered a good one if it fails to provoke the readers'imagination. And also, the best reception effect is achieved if the distance between the text and readers'horizon of expectation is proper. Foreignization in a proper degree is of the appropriate distance and achieves the best effect, and neither domestication nor overuse of foreignization does so because the former causes too short distance and the latter too long.Creative expectation and directed expectation may change. The creative expectation, if assimilated into the readers'knowledge, will become directed expectation. In order to give readers continuous fresh aesthetic experience and to enrich the linguistic forms and cultural elements of the target culture, foreignization should be adopted, that is to say, we should be faithful to the original text in both contents and forms.On the basis of the above analysis, we can reach the conclusion that foreignization will become the mainstream of translation.