A Report On The Domestication And Forcignization In The Translation Of Excerpts From Wolfram Eberhard’s A History Of China

The report is based on translation practice of an excerpted part by the author from AHistory of China, an influential historical book written by Wolfram Eberhard, who is acelebrated scholar concentrating on oriental culture and history.The whole report is composed of five parts. The first part gives a brief introduction ofthe translation project, including the selection of the translated contents, the preparationsbefore translation, the translation process and later amendment. The second part is a generalintroduction of the book—A History of China and the writer Wolfram Eberhard with ananalysis of the stylistic features of the excerpted part. The third part deals with the translationtheories on domestication and foreignization at home and abroad. First, it introduces theresource and definition of domestication and foreignization in translation. Then, the reportdiscusses the foreignization viewpoints expressed by Lawrence Venuti and makes a contrastwith the domestication attitudes indicated by Eugene Nida. Next, the report gives a summaryfor the different views towards domestication and foreignization in China since1919. At last,the report analyzes the application of domestication and foreignization in the translationproject. The fourth part puts the domestication and foreignization theories into practice byanalyzing the translating strategies used in the translation task. On the one hand, the reportdiscusses how to use domestication methods in the excerpted part: at lexical level, thetransltion of proper nouns and culture-loaded words will be explained; at syntactical level, thestrategies for translating long sentences and the passive vioce will be analyzed; at stylisticlevel, the idioms used in Chinese will be discussed. On the other hand, the report also sumsup the foreignization methods used in the translation practice. The last part reaches aconclusion for the translation project and the report.By analyzing the domestication and foreignization methods in the translation process, theauthor hopes to offer some worthwhile reference to those translators who are engaged intranslating books about Chinese culture and history written by foreign writers.