but the concepts they carry have been at least for a century at the heart 
of most translation controversies. Lu Xun (鲁迅) 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 completely conflicting views on this question. 
In his article entitled "Chinese and Western Thinking On Translation", 
A. Lefevere makes a generalization based on his comparison of Chinese and 
Western thinking on translation,  

 

When Chinese translates texts produced 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. (Bassnett & Lefevere, 
1998:14) 

 

However, Fung and Kiu have drawn quite different conclusions from their 
investigation of metaphor translation between English and Chinese, 

 

Our comparison 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 conflicting 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 compare translation by Western 
and Chinese translators, but rather look into the translation of English 

本文章共5页,当前在第2页  1  2  3  4  5