A Study Of Foreignizing Translation Of Chinese Idiomatic Expressions From The Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics

The translation of Chinese idiomatic expressions has been a concern for both domestic and foreign scholars. Recently, translators have been paying more and more attention to the problem of how to render the Chinese idiomatic expressions in English without any loss of cultural information. Shui Hu Zhuan is one of the four great classical novels of Chinese literatures and contains a large number of Chinese idiomatic expressions. Translators can do the translation of Chinese idiomatic expressions by different approaches. However, under the postcolonial background, they tend to adopt the foreignizing method, which owns an unprecedented advantage in cultural communication. However, the foreignizing translation which contains abundant cultural elements can be an obstacle to the reader's cognition and weaken the effects of cultural communication. Therefore, an unavoidable problem for the translator is how to translate the Chinese idiomatic expressions without losing their cultural elements, especially when the translator is faced with a choice between domestication and foreignization. Moreover, once the foreignizing method is adopted, how well it will be accepted, what the appropriate foreignizing method is. all of which remains a tough task for the translation studies. Aiming at the problem of preserving cultural elements in translation, the present paper holds that we should see the problem from the perspective of reception aesthetics. Reception aesthetic theory, a theory made text orientation transferred to reader orientation, was proposed in 1960s. In the light of the relevant corpus of Shui Hu Zhuan. the present paper attempts to explore the acceptability of the foreignization in translating. At the outset the author discusses the discussion of translation of Chinese idiomatic expression and the development of reception aesthetics briefly, and then the author introduces the foreignizing translation of Chinese idiomatic expression in Shui Hu Zhuan and discusses its acceptability. After that the author proposes "i+1" structure for the accepting process in terms of the key concepts of reception aesthetics, which is further testified by the examples from its relevant corpus, in order to find an instructive strategy for Chinese idiomatic expression translation.The present paper applies reception aesthetics to the foreignizing translation, for one thing, it provides an adopted analytical model for the accepting process of foreignizing translation, for the other thing, it provides strategies for the practical problem and has its theoretic and practical value.