(2) Arguments in the West

The arguments over domestication and foreignization have existed for many years。 Domestication-oriented translation in the west started to appear in the 17th century。 Nida put forward his “dynamic equivalence” theory in 1964, which made him the theoretic representative of domestication school。

Nida’s ideal of domesticating translation is clearly reflected in his principle of closet natural equivalence。 (Nida & Taber, 1969) He stressed the fluency, transparency and naturalness of the translated text。 He held that the purpose of translation is to convey the communicative information to the target language readers。 Therefore, translators should avoid “cultural conflicts” in their translation and the best approach to avoid such conflicts is to abandon those cultural images that can not produce the “equivalence response” in the TL readers or to transform these images into the ones that suit the patterns of the TL culture。 Domestication has been the dominant school of translation in the west for a long time。      Foreignization-oriented translation, with Schleiemacher as its forerunner, began to appear in the 19th century。 In the early 20th century, it began to attract more and more attention in the field of translation in the west。 Lawrence Venuti put forward his de-construction theory in 1992, which made him the theoretic representative of foreignization。 Foreignization is SL-oriented and it makes the utmost efforts to retain the flavor of the original。 As a result, TL receptors may experience the strangeness of the translated text as if they were sent abroad。文献综述

Moreover, according to Venuti, these two terms have cultural and political implications。 Whether to use foreignization or domestication is intimately related to the gain or loss of cultural identity and power discourse。 Venuti himself positively advocates foreignization, but holds a negative attitude towards domestication。 He argues that domestication is a common strategy in those dominant cultures which are “aggressively monolingual, unreceptive to the foreign, accustomed to fluent translations that invisibly inscribe foreign texts with target language values and provide readers with the narcissistic experience of recognizing their own culture in a cultural other”。 (Venuti, 2004 P15) And he suggests foreignizing translation should be used as a tool to resist ethnocentrism and cultural imperialism in those dominant cultures。

2。3 Foreignization and domestication VS literal translation and free translation

People hold different opinions about the pair of methods: foreignization and domestication vs literal translation and free translation。 Some regard them as the same and some think the dispute over foreignization and domestication is just the extension of the debate over literal and free translation。 As a matter of fact, these two pairs of terms have significant differences though they may have certain similarities。 what is pointed out is that literal translation and free translation are proposed in terms of different structures and characteristics of two languages。 They place much emphasis on language forms, such as syntactic structure, rhetoric means and even phonetics; while domestication and foreignization are mainly dealing with cultural elements。

From the mentioned-above, a conclusion can be drawn that literal translation and free translation are discussions on the linguistic level, while domestication and foreignization shift the focus of the discussion from the linguistic level to the cultural, poetic and political levels。