Strategies for Chinese Engineering Enterprises in International Publicity from the Perspective of Domesticating Translation——Case Study of CRCC

With the expanding overseas markets to Chinese enterprises, the international publicity has showed its significance. A high-quality translation helps to shape an outstanding international image and boost the international publicity, vice versa. This paper studies the case of CRCC to analyze and explore the translation strategy from domesticating translation perspective, aiming to offer some insights to Chinese engineering enterprises in their international publicity promotion.

Study on the C-E Translation of Publicity Materials from the Perspective of Venuti’s Foreignization—A Case Study of “An Overview of the World Exposition Shanghai China 2010”

Since the implementation of China’s reform and opening-up policy, the rapid development of economy and the international exchanges require a growing need for the publicity materials and translation, C-E translation in particular, in which, faithful reproduction of China’s culture and image should be regarded as the priority. Many translators have been aware of the great importance of the cultural communication in translation of publicity materials, and various theories had been applied to study this issue both at home and abroad. In terms of preserving the source-language culture, Venuti advocates the dissimilarities between two languages. And that is why he puts forward foreignization. However, due to the dominating position of domesticating translation theory in China, Lawrence Venuti’s theory of foreignization failed to receive enough attention in the field from translators and translation researchers in China. This paper, by using the theory of Venuti’s foreignization to analyze the C-E translation of the publicity materials, especially a case study of An Overview of the World Exposition Shanghai China 2010, aims to demonstrate the application of Venuti’s foreignization to analyzing the translation of the publicity materials, and therefore provides a brand-new approach for English learners to analyze the C-E publicity materials.

A Dominant Global Translation Strategy in Thai Translated Novels: The Translations of Religious Markers in Dan Brown’s Thriller Novels

When translation is considered as an integral part of larger social systems (Even-Zohar 1990), the ways in which translations are produced to serve readers’ specificity could be affected. This paper examines whether there is a preference for a specific global translation strategy due to a readership that is specialized in terms of education level. Adopting Venuti’s (1995/2008) division of global translation strategies into exoticizing and domesticating translation, it examines the frequency of local translation strategies, which are part of a global translation strategy, used in translating English-Thai religious markers in Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons, The Da Vinci Code, The Lost Symbol, Inferno and Origin. The religious markers cover words/phrases of belief systems in either Eastern or Western culture. The results show that exoticizing translation is a dominant global translation strategy that translation agents, such as translators and editors, use in literary translations of Anglo-American novels.

Reassessing the Methods of Foreignizing and Domesticating Translation

This paper clarifies the frequently used concepts of foreignizing and domesticating translation to the extent that they can be meaningfully evaluated. As it turns out, foreignizing translation is best understood as including more than one method, with each having its own evaluative profile, and domesticating translation should be cleared of confusion with other methods that have historically brought it a bad name. Based on detailed evaluations, the paper briefly proposes collaboration as the proper way forward and also shows how the ambitious strategy of foreignizing, which might be named after the German Romantic scholar Friedrich Schleiermacher, is special and what reasons there are not to accept it. Before concluding, the paper addresses issues most relevant to translating philosophical texts, where terminologies have often already been foreignized through stipulation.

Ilustracja książek dla dzieci jako źródło dylematów tłumacza - na przykładzie dwóch niemieckich przekładów Le Petit Prince Antoine’a de Saint-Exupéry’ego

The article deals with translator’s dilemmas in the context of picturebooks on the example of the new translations of the French classic “Le Petit Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Given the intermedia character or illustrated books for children, their translation is a very demanding task. It requires ‘visual literacy’, the ability of ‘reading’ and understanding pictures. The way, in which the translators cope with the interplay between the verbal and the visual, so essential for picturebooks, allows to discern their translation strategies. The examined examples point out the discrepancies between domesticating translation and the original illustrations and also the impact of new illustration on the target text. The example of Hans Magnus Enzensberger shows to what extent the original illustrations can be a disruptive factor in adapting translation, so that the only solution is to ignore the intermedia character of the source text. Such manipulation results in the empoverishment of the text. In the case of Peter Sloterdijk his demand for new illustrations can be considered as a consequence of the re-contextualization, that can be observed in his translation.

A műfordítás mint extrémsport

Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland has been translated into Hungarian six times. The most prominent literary personality of the six translators, Dezső Kosztolányi published his version in 1936, near the end of his life. The key hypothesis of my study is that Kosztolányi made his translation with a very specific purpose. He wanted to create the ultimate masterwork of domesticating translation: a text that cuts all its cultural connections with the source culture and replaces them with references of the target culture. He managed to create a translation of the first alice-book from which he removed every hint of englishness with the sole exception of the author’s name, and replaced them with Hungarian cultural items. This method is the exact opposite of the one Vladimir Nabokov used in his translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, which excludes any target-language references and makes up for them with bulky annotations. While nabokov’s extreme method replaces the signifiers of the original (transcoding), Kosztolányi’s replaces its signified elements and attitudes (adaptation). My paper examines his highly sophisticated tricks.

Beyond instrumentalism

The Chinese domesticating translation norms and Sino-centric values have been historically dominating print media translation in China, hindering the introduction of foreignness in the form of written text. Recent Sino-centric values in the Chinese translation field further hamper the introduction of foreign translation study methods. In this context, this paper looks at the non-localization strategy of Apple’s official websites; this strategy produces original English texts, such as iPhone, on the target website. It verifies the point that this strategy could effectively give foreignizing and challenging exceptions to how texts have been traditionally domesticated in China with strategies that sit in line with Chinese translation norms. That is to say, characterized by industrial natures of localization, internationalization and digital media, the implementation of non-localization strategy and the display of highly foreign non-localized texts on the Chinese site are almost under the control of source website owner, i.e. Apple Company. This non-localization strategy, therefore, has a foreignizing impact on the Chinese translation norm, due to its source-driven and digital-media based industrial nature. The cultural study of localization is necessary, as it greatly transcends instrumentalism, which could have implications on mainstream translation studies.