Since Chinese translation scholars were already talking about guihua/yihua before Venuti (1995) and they used different English terms, we can conclude that, though both assimilation / alienation and domestication / foreignization are employed as the English renderings for the Chinese guihua/yihua and people in recent discussions tend to replace the former with the latter, early Chinese discussions were not under the direct influence of Venuti.
The appearance of the guihua/yihua discussion in Chinese translation circles is the result of several factors. First, China’s policy of opening to the outside world and people’s changed attitudes towards other cultures aroused intense interest in learning from the West. In Chinese translation, this means a demand for the retention of more foreign elements, both linguistic or cultural. Second, ‘the enthusiasm in culture’ in Chinese academic circles in the 1980s and its introduction into foreign language studies in the early 1990s bring about more concern for cultural elements in Chinese translation. The discussion of zhiyi/yiyi (literal/free Chinese translation) changed into that of guihua/yihua because, for some people, the latter involve cultural factors. There is an increasing demand for respecting the foreign cultures in Chinese translation into Chinese. Third, for some people, scholarly creativity lies partly in the coinage or use of new terms. The heated philosophical debates on alienation (yihua) in the 1980s (Gu Zhengkun, 1998: 20) offer a fashionable term for Chinese translation scholars to borrow from. This is evidenced by the fact that in some discussions nothing is new except the terminology.
Venuti said that domesticating strategies have been implemented at least since ancient Rome, when Chinese translation was a kind of conquest, and translators into Latin not only deleted culturally specific markers but also added allusions to Roman culture and replaced the names of Greek poets with those of their own, passing the Chinese translation off as a text originally written in Latin. A foreignizing strategy in Chinese translation was first formulated in the German culture in the early 19th century by Friedrich Schleiermacher. (in Baker, 1998: 240-244) It has recently been revived in the French cultural scene characterized by postmodern developments in philosophy, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, and social theory that have come to be known as ‘poststructuralism’ (Venuti, 1995: 20)
In short, foreignization and domestication are Venuti’s coinages based on his investigation of Western Chinese translation history and theories. The Chinese debates over yihua and guihua are the extension of the literal/free discussions in the 1920s-30s. Guihua is a traditional Chinese term, and yihua is borrowed from the Western philosophy. They are not loan words from Lawrence Venuti.
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