Second, yihua involves respect for the source cultures in Chinese translation, while Venuti does not advocate indiscriminate valorization of every foreign culture or a metaphysical concept of foreignness as an essential value. To him, the foreign text is privileged in a foreignizing Chinese translation only insofar as it enables a disruption of target language cultural codes, so that its value is always strategic, depending on the cultural formation into which it is translated (p.42) “Hence, close Chinese translation is foreignizing only because its approximation of the foreign text entails deviating from dominant domestic values”(p.146). This seems to contradict the common Chinese assumption that foreignization is always a means of respecting the cultural others.
Third, guihua / yihua refer to specific Chinese translation methods only, whereas domestication / foreignization involve the careful selection of texts to be translated as well. Foreignizing translators choose texts that “challenge the contemporary canon of foreign literature in the target language,” and “the choice of a foreign text for Chinese translation can be just as foreignizing in its impact on the target language culture as the invention of a discursive strategy (p.186)”.
Lastly, yihua means close adherence to the linguistic and cultural features of the source texts alone. Foreignization also involves use of non-standard target language, as is further explained by Venuti in his email1 to a Chinese postgraduate student named Ma Jia (Eddie) on December 2, 2002.
In this letter, Venuti said that foreignization can take a number of different forms. Close adherence to the foreign text is one, and retaining cultural markers is another. The most decisive way, however, may well be producing a variation on the current standard dialect of the receiving language. Variations here mean regional and social dialects, archaism, jargons and technical terminologies, stylistic innovations and neologisms, literary figures like metaphors. It can also be achieved through the choice of a foreign text for Chinese translation translated fluently or in the current standard dialect.
In other words, for Venuti, foreignization means selecting a foreign text that is marginal in the target culture, but translating it in a fluent way (similar to guihua); or choosing a foreign text that is canonical in the target culture, but translating it with marginal discourse. Marginal discourse here includes adherence to source language form and retention of source cultural elements (similar to yihua) as well as the use of non-standard target language. The opposite is true of domestication.
The above comparison reveals that domestication/foreignization focuses on whether the Chinese translation deviates from and challenges the target culture values, while guihua and yihua concentrate on retention /deletion of the source language/culture features. The former includes the selection of texts to be translated while the latter refers to the Chinese translational activity per se. The two pairs of terms overlap, but are not the same.
Related Articles:
This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 4:11 pm and is filed under 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, Uncategorized.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.
