Domestication: Another Tactic To Enter And Challenge The Hegemonic Culture

Postcolonial translation studies,which originated in the mid-to-late 1980s,is an application of postcolonial theory to the translation studies.By denying the utopian theoretical hypotheses about linguistic and cultural equalities in the traditional translation studies,postcolonial translation theories see the relationship between the source text and target text not as a relationship of equals,but as one containing a basic quality of power. Postcolonial translation theorists put translation activity in a certain historical,cultural and political contexts so as to probe into the relationships between translation and cultural hegemony,ideology,translator's cultural identity,etc.In postcolonial context,translation may play the role of either colonization or decolonization,which depends largely on the method or mode of translation.Generally speaking,when a hegemonic culture translates works produced by the dominated culture, domesticating translation will be a primary tool of empire insofar as it encourages hegemonic cultures to translate foreign texts into their own terms,thus eradicating cultural differences.Foreignizing,on the other hand,is a mode of translation designed to retain and assert difference and diversity by sticking closely to the contours of the source text,thus a rebellion against hegemonic cultures.However,this does not necessarily mean that domesticating can only be a means through which hegemonic culture is confirmed.The acts of translation should be contextualized in terms of certain historical background,translator,translation purposes, translation effects,etc.Recently,more and more scholars proposed different viewpoints to the traditional preconception on the impact of domestication and foreignization in postcolonial context.For example,Venuti,the advocator of foreignizing translation who builds up a binary opposition between the "ethics of difference" and "ethics of sameness" as the conceptual anchor for his theory of translation ethics,subjects it to a process of self-deconstruction;Jacquemond,who raises queries about the effect of foreignization, believes that it can be used by Orientalists as a means of vilifying dominated culture by emphasizing its "otherness" in terms of language and culture;Robinson argues that the foreignization is based on a naive linguistics,because for the target readers the quaintness of foreignized texts makes the author or source culture in general seem childish,primitive,backward,precisely a reaction foreignism is supposed to counteract.Ku Hungming was a noted Chinese cultural scholar and translator at the turn of the 20^th century when China was still in confrontation with the challenge from the West.His translation of Lun Yu,an epoch-making contribution to the world's culture not only broke the monopoly secured by the Westerners in the field of "introducing Chinese learning to the West" for hundreds of years,but also exerted profound and far-reaching influence on the Western society,especially in Germany after the First World War.Among the papers published so far on the research into Ku Hungming,many focus their discussions on Ku's domesticating translation strategy linguistically,few of them having touched upon the postcolonial translation perspective.In view of this,the present thesis attempts to apply postcolonial translation theories concerning power differentials and power struggles between hegemonic culture and dominated culture to the study of Ku Hungming's translation of Lun Yu.Through a detailed illustration of application of domestication in Ku's translation of Lun Yu and an explanation of the decolonizing effects of domestication,the author of this thesis hopes to justify the hypothesis that domestication,in a certain condition,can also serve as a translation mode to establish positive cultural identity of dominated culture as well as fight against hegemonic culture.