A Study Of Domestication And Foreignization In Wolf Totem From The Perspective Of Memetics

With the communicative development of China and the western world, western readers’ need for Chinese culture has been increasing. However, western readers’ access of Chinese literature are limited within few classic works, such as A Dream of Red Mansions, Pilgrimage to the West. As the primary media of cross-cultural communication, translation plays the most critical role in the transmission of Chinese culture to the western world. Therefore, the main reason for the phenomenon lies in the translation deficiency of literary works both in quantity and quality. As soon as Wolf Totem was published, it enjoyed big popularity all over the world. It has been translated into 30 languages, and was sold in more than 100 countries. Since Wolf Totem is such a successful work which reveal Chinese culture and history to the western world, the study of its translation is of great significance for the spread of Chinese culture theoretically and practically.As a relative new theory, memetics is powerful in explaining culture translation strategies----domestication and foreignization. Based on memetics, this thesis approaches the translation of Wolf Totem by analyzing the translation strategies employed in Wolf Totem with descriptive and qualitative research methods. In addition, this thesis further probes into the factors that influence the selection of domesticaion and foreigination with memetics trying to explore the success of Wolf Totem and bring implication for Chinese literary translation. The major findings of this research are as follows.As the primary purpose of literary work is to entertain, literary translation should ensure the target readers’ fully comprehension of the translated work in the first place. Domestication is the translation strategy which highlights the acceptability of the translated version. Therefore, to ensure target readers’ successful decoding of the original core memes, domestication translation was adopted by replacing original memes with similar memes of the target language.Foreignization translation puts emphasis on the source text and tries to reproduce it in the original way. Since Wolf Totem is a literary work rich of Chinese culture, the translation of it could be regarded as the transmission of culture memes from Chinese culture to the English culture. To make target readers more familiar with the source culture and promote cultural communication, Howard adopts foreignization when there is no counterpart memes in the target language or the foreignization translation of cultural memes would not barricade the readers’ understanding of the core memes, thus achieving the purpose of spreading Chinese culture as well as enriching the target language culture.In the translation of allusions, both domestication and foreignization translation are adopted to spread Chinese culture to the English world as well as ensures the readers’ successful infection by original memes. Therefore, domestication and foreignization are not contradictory but mutually complementary and could co-exist in literary translation.Both domestication and foreignization play important part in culture meme’s transmission from China to the western world. In the translation of Wolf Totem, Howard Goldblatt’s selection of domestication or foreignization is affected by factors as meme type, culture, the translator’s subjectivity, translation purpose and the target reader’s receptivity, as the subject of translation activity, translator’s subjectivity plays the most crucial part in the choice of translation strategies.Based on the analysis of domestication and foreignization with memetics, the thesis proves that memetics are powerful in explaining the translation of literary works, which provide guidance for literary translation. In addition, this research enriches research that apply memetics in translation and provides a new perspective in dealing with other problems of literary translation.