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Domestication and Foreignisation

Introduction

Foreignisation and domestication are the two strategies for translation. The strategies are about the extent to which, the translators manage to make the text match with the culture which is our target. Domestication is a tactic to make the text match as closely as possible with the culture of the language that it is being translated to, which may also result in losing some of the information from the source text. Foreignisation is the approach in which the idea is to retain the information from the source text, which includes to consciously breaking the conventions of the target language in order to protect and conserve its meaning.

These strategies of foreignisation and domestication have been argued over for hundreds of years, but it was Lawrence Venuti, who was the first person to originate and put them together in their modern sense. It was him, who introduced these strategies of domestication and foreignisation to the field of translation studies through his book 'The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation'. What Lawrence Venuti brought new to this field was his analysis that the dichotomy between foreignisation and domestication was that of an ideological one. He was of the view that the ethical choice for the translators was foreignization.

Discussion

In the book, 'The Scandals of Translation: Towards and Ethics of Difference, Lawrence Vetuni says that foreignisation and domestication talk about the extent to which a translation assimilates a foreign text to the translating culture and the language, and to what extent does it signals the differences of the text.

Lawrence Venuti is of the view that all the translators should view the process of translation from the prospective of the culture, which reflects the source language and the cultural norms. He says that it the duty of the translator to communicate these norms by conserving their meaning and their foreignness to the text of the target language. Each step in the process of translation, starting from the selecting of the foreign texts to the execution of the translation strategies to the editing, assessing and reading of the translations, is mediated by the different cultural values that are there in the target language.

Lawrence venuti has estimated that the practice and theory of the English language translation has been subjugated by submission, by effortless domestication. He has very strictly criticized those translators who, in their efforts to reduce the foreignness of the target text, decrease the foreign cultural norms to the cultural values of the target language. According to the point view of Lawrence Venuti, the strategy of domestication very harshly eliminate the cultural values and in the process, develops a texts which seems like it has been written in the target language and which believes in the cultural norms of the target reader. Lawrence venuti is a strong advocate of the strategy of foreignisation and considers it to be an ethno deviant pressure on the cultural values of the target language to register the cultural and linguistic difference of the foreign ...