2.2. Overseas’ Theories on Translation
During the debate of translation, two theories are mainly discussed: 1. Domestication and Foreignization; 2. Skopo Theory. The basic introductions to the two theories are unfolded as followings.
2.2.1. Domestication and Foreignization
Domestication and foreignization are strategies in translation, regarding to which translators make a text conform to the target culture. It was Domestication is the strategy of making text closely conform to the culture of the language being translated to, which may involve the loss of information from the source text. Foreignization is the strategy of retaining information form the source text, and involves deliberately breaking the conventions of the target language to preserve its meaning. (Daniel, 2009) The first person to formulate the strategies in the modern sense was Lawrence Venuti, who introduced them to the field of translation studies in 1995with his book The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. (Venuti, 1995) Venuti's innovation to the field was his view that the dichotomy between domestication and foreignization was an ideological one; he views foreignization as the ethical choice for translators to make.
According to Lawrence Venuti, every translator should look at the translation process through the prism of culture which refracts the source language cultural norms and it is the translator’s task to convey them, preserving their meaning and their foreignness, to the target language text. Every step in the translation process-from the selection of foreign texts to the implementation of translation strategies to the editing, reviewing, and reading of translations-is mediated by the perse cultural values that circulate in the target language. He strongly advocates the foreignization strategy, considering it to be “an ethno deviant on target-language cultural values to register the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text, sending the reader abroad.” Thus an adequate translation would be the one that would highlight the foreignness of the source text and instead of allowing the dominant target culture to assimilate the differences of the source culture, it should rather signal these differences.