A Comparative And Contrastive Study Of Lu Xun’s And Venuti’s Foreignizing Translation Theories From The Perspective Of Translation Ethics

Entering the new century,“returning to ethics in translation studies”(Pym)makes the translation theorists pay more attention to the study of translation ethics.Ethics is a philosophy which is concerned with the study on the conventions ofinterpersonal relationship in a certain society and their corresponding moral principles.Being a kind of communicative activity, translation can be regarded as an ethicalactivity and it definitely needs ethics as its guidance. Therefore, cultural globalizationposes a new situation to the translation practice and highlights the ethics of translationin the new context. In translation activities,“Respecting differences, awingcivilization” has become the basic ethical view to the “culture other”. Under thesecircumstances, foreignizing translation gives us an optimal selection and plays aformative role in the cultural communication. It maintains culture diversity and playsa crucial part in promoting intercultural communication.Lu Xun and Lawrence Venuti, two significant figures in translation academia,share a similarity of advocating foreignizing translation. Venuti coins the terms“domesticating translation” and “foreignizing translation” in his book TheTranslator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. He criticizes and challenges thedominant domesticating translation and concludes that the objective of translation wasto reserve the “foreigness” rather than seeking similarity. And he stresses that hisforeignizing translation is not only a specific strategy but an ethical attitude towardthe foreign text and the “culture other”. In China, Lu Xun put forward his foreignizingtranslation as early as in the1930s. He actively employed “foreignization” in histranslation activities, from the choice of texts to that of translation strategies. Despitetheir distance in time and space and the different translation practices in diversetranslation tradition, there are some coincidences and similarities besides thedifferences in their foreignizing translation theories.Based on Berman’s translation ethics and Chesterman’s models of translationethics, this thesis focuses on the comparative study of Lu Xun’s and Venuti’s foreignizing translation theories from the perspective of translation ethics. Theresearch tries to explore the answer that translation ethics is the underlying andfundamental factor that guides the translation activity. Through a comparative study,we can find that their foreignizing translations all show perfectly the translationethical motivation of Berman’s theory-respecting difference and enriching oneself,which is also Venuti’s view of ethics of difference. At the same time, theirforeignizing translations manifest Chesterman’s modes of ethics of representation,ethics of communication. The similarities of their theories also include the politicalethical viewpoint and the national identification, the selection of the source text, thechoices of readers, discourse and language styles. The dissimilarities mainly includethe origin of theory and the different historical background and cultural factors. Nomatter what similarities or dissimilarities are, their translation thoughts are allinfluenced by translation ethics.The thesis also intends to contribute to the current research of translation ethicsand display the significance of translation ethics in translation. Meanwhile, it servesas a new view on the comparative study of Lu Xun’s and Venuti’s foreignizingtranslation. Foreignizing translation, as an ethical attitude between languages andcultures, will not only enrich our theoretical study but also help communicate withforeigners smoothly and successfully.The creative points of the thesis are as follows: firstly, the thesis studies theethical pursuit of Lu Xun’s foreignizing translation; secondly, the thesis attachesimportance to “the ethics of difference” of Venuti’s foreignizing translation theory andpoints out that translation ethics is central to translation; thirdly, the comparativestudy from the perspective of translation ethics provides us a new angle for translationstudy fields.