Rethinking Resistancy

Over the past decade or so, China has witnessed an increased interest in "cultural study" in translation research. Resistancy, as an important "cultural theory" developed by Lawrence Venuti, has been a hot topic among translation researchers. Resistant strategy proposes to resist the dominance of fluent translation that results in translators' marginal status, makes translation an invisible activity, domesticates the foreignness of the source texts and leads to Anglo-American cultural hegemony. Through resistancy, Venuti hopes to change translator's marginal status, make visible the foreign culture and challenge Anglo-American cultural hegemony.The discussion on resistancy in China is somewhat unbalanced, with most of the attention paid to the introduction and clarification of the theory, while leaving other aspects of the theory untouched. For instance, as a cultural-political translation strategy, whether resistancy is effective to achieve the above-mentioned purposes for translators remains untested in China.The present study attempts to deal with this question. It first gives a comprehensive introduction of resistant theory, next proposes a roadmap to conduct translation research based on the theory, then analyzes A Collection of Foreign Short Novels with the proposed roadmap and finally evaluates the effectiveness and concludes the limitation of resistancy based on the results of the analysis made in the case study.The present study demonstrates the way resistancy is employed in translation as well as in translation research and provokes a rethinking of the theory based on the analysis conducted in the case study, thus contributing to a better understanding of the theory in China.