UQ eSpace

Abstract

The distinction between foreignizing and domesticating strategies is widely used in translation studies. This distinction has been elaborated by Venuti on several occasions, but usually from a theoretical standpoint and at a high level of generality. This thesis attempts to identify empirical measures of the difference in outcomes between “foreignizing” and “domesticating” strategies for translation. The source texts, “The Courtesan’s Jewel Box” and “The Beggar King’s Daughter”, were chosen from the vernacular short stories edited by Feng Menglong. Five measures were selected on the basis that they require the translator to choose between domestication and foreignization in the translation of “foreign” elements of each source text. These source text elements are: proper names, archaisms, social relationship terms, the literary devices known as the “storyteller’s manner”, and metaphors which are present in the source language but absent in the target language. For each of these elements, the translator must either retain their “foreignness” in the target text or domesticate them into terms that will be unexceptionable to readers of the target language. Each target text can then be scored on whether each element is foreignized or domesticated. The effectiveness of the measures is evaluated by looking at two English translations of each of two Chinese stories. The analysis of the five empirical measures demonstrated that, within the limitations of the small sample size, they consistently differentiated between domesticating and foreignizing strategies in the aggregate sample of the two stories. Applying the five measures to both stories indicates that the 2000 and 2007 translations by Yang Shuhui and Yang Yunqing employ foreignizing strategies more often than the 1957 translations by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang. The measure which shows the greatest divergence between foreignization and domestication is the storyteller’s manner. Keywords: Translation strategies, domestication, foreignization, Chinese vernacular story, huaben, Feng Menglong, Ming fiction, storyteller’s manner.