Reproduction Of Irish Culture In Chinese Translation Of Dubliners From The Perspective Of Domestication And Foreignization

Irish author James Joyce’s(1882-1941)Dubliners(1914)depicts the gloomy and depressing life of Dublin residents,revealing the multifaceted social issues that Ireland faced in the early twentieth century.As the novel is heavily focused on portraying Irish culture in detail,some of its sense may escape readers of different backgrounds who rely on its translated version.There are several Chinese editions of the book,and previous studies of these have predominantly paid attention to the linguistic aspect,rather than the impact that the choice of translation strategy has on the reproduction of the original culture.The two translations chosen for this paper are the 1984 version translated by Sun Liang et al.and published by the Shanghai Translation Publishing House(hereafter referred to as the version of Sun),and the 2010 version translated by Wang Fengzhen and published by the Shanghai Translation Publishing House.In this paper,a number of representative examples from these two Chinese versions of Dubliners are theoretically analysed from the perspective of two dissimilar translation strategies: domestication and foreignization.According to Lawrence Venuti,the foreignization translation strategy centres on maintaining the culture of the source language,thereby exposing readers of the target language to the language style and culture of the source language.By contrast,the domestication translation strategy requires the translation to be fluent and caters more to the reading habits of target language readers.This paper analyzes the representation of Irish culture in these two versions in terms of two aspects: culture-loaded words and images of Dubliners.Furthermore,the reason for the representation of cultural differences between these two versions is investigated.By comparing the meaning of the original text to that conveyed by the translations,it is shown that the version of Sun exploits domestication through its wording and combines domestication and foreignization to reproduce Irish culture,while the version by Wang tends to use foreignization as its chief method and domestication as its secondary one to bring readers to encounter Irish culture.On this basis,it is further concluded that regardless of their choice of translation strategy under the influence of the era and personal translation viewpoints,translators ought to fully understand and respect the source language culture and create a version that enables Chinese readers to truly experience and perceive the differences and relations between the source language culture and the target language culture.