Domestication and foreignization

1.

DOMESTICATION AND
FOREIGNIZATION
Strategies in translation

2.

DOMESTICATION AND
FOREIGNIZATION
Domestication and foreignization are strategies in translation,
regarding the degree to which translators make a text conform
to the target culture (the culture corresponding to the language
in which the translation is made).
• The target language is the language which a written text is translated
into. (the target culture, text) – исходный язык - ИЯ
• The source language is the initial text to be translated. (the source culture,
text) – переводящий язык – ПЯ

3.

FOREIGNIZATION
Foreignization is the strategy of retaining information from the source text,
and involves deliberately breaking the conventions of the target language to
preserve its meaning.
It is “an ethnodeviant pressure on those (cultural) values to register the
linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text, sending the reader
abroad”. (L.Venuti,The Translator’s Invisibility)
Форенизация – сохранение чуждых культуре ПЯ элементов при
переводе, «отчуждение», которое позволяет читателю угадать в
переведенном тексте особенности иной культуры и языковой среды.

4.

DOMESTICATION
Domestication is the strategy of making text closely conform to the
culture of the language being translated to, which may involve the loss
of information from the source text.
It is “an ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to target-language
cultural values” that “brings the author back home…”. (L.Venuti, The
Translator’s Invisibility)
Доместикация – культурная адаптация, «приближение» автора и
его произведения к культуре ПЯ.

5.

DOMESTICATION AND
FOREIGNIZATION
Domestication brings the writer to the reader, while foreignization takes the reader to the
writer.
E. Nida (Ю. Найда) tended to favour domestication as the main strategy which should be
used in translation, while L.Venuti (Л. Венути) strongly supported foreignization.
These strategies are not purely cultural phenomenon, the choice of one strategy or the
other can be influenced not only by a translator’s personal preferences, but by the political
situation – whether this or that culture is dominant or subordinate (доминирует или
находится в подчинении).

6.

These strategies have been debated for hundreds of years. A direct
indication to a pair of these seemingly opposing translation strategies
was first made in the XIX century, but the first person to formulate
them in their modern sense was Lawrence Venuti, who introduced them
to the field of translation studies in 1995 with his book The Translator's
Invisibility:A History of Translation.

7.

In his 1998 book The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of
Difference, Venuti states that "Domestication and foreignization
deal with 'the question of how much a translation assimilates a
foreign text to the translating language and culture, and how much
it rather signals the differences of that text'".
According to Venuti, the domesticating strategy
“violently” erases the cultural values and thus creates
a text which as if had been written in the target
language and which follows the cultural norms of the
target reader. He, therefore, strongly advocates the
foreignization strategy.
He strictly criticized the translators who in order to
minimize the foreignness of the target text reduce the
foreign cultural norms to target-language cultural values.