Domestication And Foreignization-Comparison Of Two English Versions Of The Analects

Most of the English versions of The Analects have been done by foreign scholars. And Arthur Waley's version is considered the most successful complete version among them. However, we still can find that the overall quality of his translation is not high. Since Confucianism is one of the major sources of Chinese culture, it is our mission to transmit our traditional culture to the world. Lately Professor Ding Wangdao has translated 100 entries of The Analects. His translation is quite faithful to the original text, and his translation is also very succinct. This paper intends to make a comparison between these two English versions. Since Professor only translated 100 entries of The Analects, it actually compares 100 entries which are both translated by these two scholars. The Analects translation is innately related to cross-cultural study. Translating a text from one culture to another usually requires that a choice first be made between two basic translation strategies: domestication and foreignization. Domestication refers to the translation strategy in which a transparent, fluent style is adopted in order to minimize the strangeness of the source text for target language readers. Foreignization means"deliberately breaks target conventions by retaining something of the foreignness of the original (Shuttleworth & Cowie, 1997: 59)."This thesis is intended to explore how to apply the domestication and foreignization in translating The Analects into English. Domestication means to make the text recognizable and familiar and thus bring the foreign culture closer to the reader in target culture, while foreignization means to take the reader over to the foreign culture and to make him feel the linguistic and cultural differences. It also reviews the researches which have been done on different versions of The Analects, and on domestication and foreignization. It concludes that the two translation methods are not contradictory but complementary to each other. And a flexible and appropriate combination of domestication and foreignization is the only way in which the linguistic and cultural conflicts in translation can be settled. According to the defined notions of domestication and foreignization, the author states how she technically finds out domestication and foreignization are used in translating The Analects on the linguistic and cultural level. It discusses domestication and foreignization in The Analects translation from four levels: the lexical level, the syntactic level, the stylistic level and the cultural level. Then it comes to the conclusion that on the lexical level, it is good to translate them by choosing the method of domestication. And when the words in the source language are culture-bound, it is wise to choose the foreignization. Certain notes are needed when it is necessary; on the syntactic level, domestication is a dominant translation strategy; and on the stylistic level, it is the foreignization which should be applied more often; and on the cultural level, it is the foreignization which plays a dominant role in the process of translating The Analects into English. This result may help to figure out a way which we could apply when we are translating the literary classics in Pre-Qin Period.