A Study On Cultural Elements Translation Of The House On Mango Street From Perspective Of Foreignizing Translation Strategy

The House on Mango Street is the first novel of Sandra Cisneros (1954-), one of the most influential Mexican American female writers. It tells the stories of a Mexican American girl named Esperanza on the Mango Street of Chicago’s immigrant community. In2006, it was translated into Chinese by Pan Pa and until now it is still the only Chinese version in mainland China. Pan Pa tries to overcome the comprehension difficulties resulting from the cultural default through the method of foreignizing translation and abundant application of annotations. This approaching-the-original translation method bridges the gap of the cultural communication and maximally realizes literary value and educational function of the English version.Lawrence Venuti’s foreignizing translation criticizes the domination of fluent translation and advocates the visibility of translators. He points out that the essence of this translation theory is the preservation of foreignness through the strategies such as abusive fidelity and resistancy. Moreover, Venuti’s foreignizing strategy is not just a translation method but more importantly, a cultural strategy. It resists transparent illusion caused by the fluent translation and signifies linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign texts through disrupting the cultural codes that is prevailing in target language. By preserving the differences in target-language text, this translation theory shows great respect to the foreignness of the foreign cultures. From this point, it is helpful to resist cultural ethnocentrism, maintain cultural diversity, and consequently contributes to the cultural equality and multiculturalism in the world. What’s more, Venuti tries to develop his foreignizing translation into a theoretical, critical and textual means by which translation can be studied and practiced as place of difference, rather than the homogeneity that widely characterizes it today. Taking Venuti’s foreignizing translation as a critic method and focusing on Pan’s translation of the culture-loaded elements of the original, this thesis holds that Pan Pa’s foreignizing translation greatly preserves the Mexican and American cultural foreignness in the novel The House on Mango Street, makes up the cultural default and effectively avoids misunderstandings and confusions. His translation respects the cultural difference and promotes the transmission of the exotic cultures in China so that it helps maintain cultural diversity. Thus, from the perspective of cultural communication, Pan Pan’s Chinese version of The House on Mango Street is a successful translation.