The Implications of Foreignization and Domestication in Moment in Peking

Abstract

This paper aims to review the strategies of Foreignization, and that of Domestication applied respectively in the creation and the back translation of Moment in Peking. This paper chooses the novel Moment in Peking as the research material for the original version of this work tells a Chinese story in English, being translated back into Chinese later. This uniqueness makes it worthy of studying the translation methods behind the two processes. The Chinese author, Yutang Lin, works as a writer and translator to complete this book. There are multiple examples of C-E translation regarding traditional Chinese culture. And the author adopts Foreignization most of the time. Transliteration is used together with extra explanations to convey the proper Chinese expressions to the greatest extent. For the Chinese version of Moment in Peking, the translator, Zhenyu Zhang, relies more on Domestication. The English version uses many free translations concerning proverbs, and the translator finds the corresponding Chinese. Also, in terms of the translation of the titles, the translator employs captions for each chapter, which is a stylish mark in traditional Chinese novels. The different approaches of Lin and Zhang have their own advantages. The former maintains the majority of pronunciations of Chinese culture-proper items, which are deciphered by following sentences. The latter meets with the expression habit of Chinese culture and the recognized format of traditional Chinese literature. Such cases may be helpful to the future translation-relating analysis of works that are written in the target language and translated back to source language.