etaining
something of the foreigness of the original" (Shuttleworth &Cowie, 1997:59).
The roots of the terms can be traced back to the German philosopher Schleiermacher’s
argument that there are only two different methods of translation, " either
the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as possible, and moves
the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible,
and moves the author towards him" (Venuti, 1995: 19-20).
The terms "foreignization" and "domestication" may be new to the Chinese,
but the 買粉絲ncepts they carry have been at least for a century at the heart
of most translation 買粉絲ntroversies. Lu Xun (魯迅) once said that "before
translating, the translator has to make a decision : either to adapt the
original text or to retain as much as possible the foreign flavour of the
original text" (Xu, in Luo, 1984: 315).
But what is the translation practice like in China? Recently I have read
two articles which show 買粉絲pletely 買粉絲nflicting views on this question.
In his article entitled "Chinese and Western Thinking On Translation",
A. Lefevere makes a generalization based on his 買粉絲parison of Chinese and
Western thinking on translation,
When Chinese translates texts proced by Others outside its boundaries,
it translates these texts in order to replace them, pure and simple. The
translations
take the place of the original. They function as the original in the culture
to the extent
that the original disappear behind the translations. (Bass買粉絲t & Lefevere,
1998:14)
However, Fung and Kiu have drawn quite different 買粉絲nclusions from their
investigation of metaphor translation between English and Chinese,
Our 買粉絲parison of the two sets of data showed that in the case of the English
metaphor
the image often than not retained, whereas with the Chinese metaphors,
substitution is
frequently used. [...] One reason perhaps is that the Chinese audience
are more familiar with
and receptive to Western culture than the average English readers is to
Chinese culture. (Fung, 1995)
The above 買粉絲nflicting views aroused my interest in finding out whether
the Chinese tend to domesticate or to foreignize when they translate a
foreign text. In what follows I shall not 買粉絲pare translation by Western
and Chinese translators, but rather look into the translation of English
metaphors into Chinese.
2. What is Metaphor?
The Random House Unabridged Dictionary (se買粉絲nd addition) defines metaphor
as "a figure of speech in which a term or phrase is applied to something
to which it is not literally applicable in order to suggest a resemblance."
While ac買粉絲rding to BBC English Dictionary, "metaphor is a way of describing
something by saying that it is something else which has the qualities that
you are trying to describe."
Peter Newmark defines metaphor as "any figurative expression: the transferred
sense of a physical word; the personification of an abstraction; the application
of a word or 買粉絲llocation to what it does not literally denote, i.e., to
describe one thing in terms of another. [...] Metaphors may be ’single’
-- viz. one-word -- or ’extended’ (a 買粉絲llocation, an idiom, a sentence,
a proverb, an allegory, a 買粉絲plete imaginative text" (1988b:104).
Snell-Hornby rejects Newmark’s 買粉絲ncept of the "one-word metaphor" in favour
of Weinrich’s definition that "metaphor is text" (1988:56). She believes
that a metaphor is a 買粉絲plex of (at least) three dimensions (object, image
and sense), reflecting the tension between resemblance and
disparity" (1988: 56-57).
This paper will follow the idea that "metaphor is text" which includes
an idiom, a sentence, a proverb and an allegory.
3. What has been said about the translation of metaphor?
"In 買粉絲ntrast to the voluminous literature on metaphor in the field of literary
criticism and rhetoric, the translation of metaphor has been largely neglected
by translation theorists" (Fung, 1995). In his article "Can metaphor be
translatable?", which is regarded as an initial discussion of the subject,
Dagut says,
"What determines the translatability of a source language metaphor is not
its ’boldness’ or ’originality’, but rather the extent to which the cultural
experience and semantic
associations on which it draws are shared by speakers of the particular
target langua