Domestication And Foreignization

Domestication and foreignization are two translation strategies; they deal mainly with the extent to which a translator makes a text observe the cultural norms and values of the target language and culture. Hence, they supply both a linguistic and a cultural guidance. Debates over domestication and foreignization have existed for a relatively long time. However, the first person to term them as such was the American translation theorist Lawrence Venuti in 1995 in his book The Translator 's Invisibility: A History of Translation. Domestication seeks to reduce the peculiarity of a foreign text for target language readers, while foreignization seeks to have a target text intentionally go against and break target conventions by retaining foreign

“Foreignizing translation signifies the differences of the foreign text, yet only by disrupting the codes that prevail in the translating language” (Venuti 2008: 15). When Venuti speaks of “good translation” as one that has contains foreignization, this makes it clear the disruption which is implied in foreignisation is not simply a viable strategy, but also the desirable one. Domestication and foreignization are described by Venuti as ethical points of view to translation. The ethical side of foreignization is the particular translation’s relationship with the source culture, the target culture and its reader. When it comes to the source culture, Venuti perceives translation as a violent process because the translator must always “eliminate” and “disarrange” the source language text. While this violence is to some degree unavoidable, Venuti believes that it develops into a big problem when domestication becomes widespread. He even denies that this violence is metaphorical, as he believes it is literally done to the semantic, syntactic, phonemic, and phonetic structures of the source text. Therefore Venuti claims that it is necessary to “do wrong at home” in order to “do right abroad” by “deviating enough from native norms to stage an alien reading experience” (Venuti 2008: 16). Consequently, the translator has an ethical duty towards the source language and culture to demonstrate their dissimilarity in the translation, hence preserving them as much as possible as a separate

Eugene Nida on the other hand is in favour of domestication, although he does not call it by that name. He makes a distinction between two types of equivalences as the two basic translation orientations; formal and dynamic (also known as functional) equivalance. The first focuses mainly on the message itself, paying attention to both form and content. It is a way of giving comprehension into the lexical, grammatical or structural form of a source text; this is similar to literal translation and foreignization. The latter, however, is built on the principle of equivalent effect, meaning the relationship between the target receiver and message should be the same as that between the original receiver and message. In fact in Language, Culture and Translating he states “the readers of a translated text should be able to understand and appreciate it in essentially the same manner as the original readers did.”‖ (Nida 1995: 118) Nida’s dynamic equivalence is focused on and is intended to be a guide on the translation of Bible, with the aim of converting non-Christians. In order to ensure that the readers of the target language are able to get the correct message he seeks to domesticate the translation to make it relevant to present society. So for example “do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing” can instead be translated into English as “do it in such a way that even your closest friend will not know about it”. When handling cultural factors in other texts,