2. Different referents for the two pairs of concepts
Early discussions and a large percentage of present-day talks about yihua/guihua were not very different from those about literal/free Chinese translation. Lu Xun (1935), the first one to talk about guihua in Chinese translation, did not define the term, but gave the example of a Japanese translator whose Chinese translation was close to paraphrase. (in Luo Xinzhang, 1984:301) Liu Yingkai (1987/1994:269-282), the initiator of the Chinese guihua/yihua debate since the 1990s, said that guihua means changing the ‘guest’ source language into idiomatic ‘host’ language so that the Chinese translations look familiar and sound fluent, without any feeling of strangeness. It is the extreme form of free Chinese translation, including the over-use of Chinese idioms and archaic Chinese expressions, of paraphrasing source cultural images, replacement of the source language idioms with Chinese substitutes, and unjustified change of no metaphors into metaphors. To Sun Zili (1996: 45-6), guihua refers to “the change from idiomatic source language to idiomatic target language” while yihua means “adoption of new words and expressions from the foreign works.” The definitions of Liu and Sun are not very different from how people understand literal/free Chinese translation. And Zhu Zhiyu (2001:4) claims explicitly that “literal Chinese translation generally belongs to foreignizing and free Chinese translation may be said to be domesticating.” In recent discussions, some people say that guihua/yihua involve cultural treatment while, literal/free Chinese translation, linguistic factors alone. But it may be difficult to say that translating with the latter methods does not involve cultural problems.
For Venuti (1995:20), the domesticating method is “an ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to target language cultural values, bringing the author back home.” It is closely related to fluent Chinese translation, which is written in current, widely used and standard English. It is immediately recognizable and intelligible, “familiarized” and domesticated. In short, standard target language rather than a variation is used.
Foreignizing Chinese translation practices entail the choice of a foreign text and the invention of Chinese translation discourses. A foreignizing translator can use “a discursive strategy that deviates from the prevailing hierarchy of dominant discourses (e.g. dense archaism), but also by choosing to translate a text that challenges the contemporary canon of foreign literature in the target language”. (p148; p310) Venuti cites Pound, Newman and himself as examples of foreignizing translators. Archaism seems to be a major feature of this strategy. (p195).
Venuti’s concepts of domestication and fluent Chinese translation are similar to the Chinese concept of guihua, but foreignization and strangeness obviously differ widely from yihua.
First, yihua refers to faithfulness through retention of the linguistic and cultural features of the source texts, while for Venuti, unfaithfulness to the source text is also a kind of foreignization. For example, he claimed that his own foreignizing English version of De Angelis’s poem has not only challenged the dominant aesthetic in the Anglo-American culture, but has also deviated from the Italian text in decisive ways. Certain features of the syntax in his Chinese translation make it stranger than the Italian source text. (pp. 291-2)
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