Comp Stud Trans EN 5

Chapter 5: A Comparative Study of Proverb Translation from the Perspective of Domestication and Foreignization

从异化和归化中看中西方谚语翻译的差异 马新，Ma Xin, Hunan Normal University, China

Abstract

As a continuation of the dispute between literal translation and free translation, the conflict between domestication and foreignization has risen from the linguistic level to the level of literature, culture and thought. It further analyzes the cultural differences between the two languages in the translation process. Among various elements in languages, proverbs have been circulated in the Chinese and Western folk for a long time due to their pronounced national color and distinctive cultural connotations. In proverb translation, whether to preserve the exotic nature of proverbs or to favor the target language readers, disparate understandings reflect the complex historical origins of strong culture, weak culture, post-colonial culture, etc. Therefore, this paper reviews the historical materials of the domestication and foreignization debates between China and the West firstly. It then goes further to compare the differences about proverb translation in terms of ecological culture, language culture, religious culture, material culture and social culture based on Nida's classification of culture . By doing so, we try to summarize some different national consciousness behind it and get better understanding about the parallels and distinctions among them.

Key Words

domestication; foreignization; proverb translation; cultural classification

中文摘要

作为直译和意译之争的延续，归化和异化之争由语言层面，上升到文学、文化、思想的高度，进一步剖析了翻译过程中两种语言背后的文化差异。谚语长期流传于中西方民间，带有浓厚的民族色彩和鲜明的文化内涵。在谚语翻译中，对于保留其本身异域性或是倾向于译入语读者问题的认识，体现着强势文化、弱势文化、后殖民主义文化等复杂的历史渊源。由此，本文基于中西方归化与异化论战史料，结合Nida的文化五类分理论，从生态文化、语言文化、宗教文化、物质文化和社会文化来比较中西方谚语翻译的差异，在源语文化和译语文化的不同处理上，揭示其背后所蕴含的不同民族意识。从而在比较中体味文化的差异。

关键词

归化；异化；谚语翻译；文化分类

Introduction

In China or western countries, there is a long history about the argument between domestication and foreignization. By looking back to it, the earliest exploration of Chinese scholars could be traced back to the dispute between “Text” and “Quality” in the Buddhist Sutra translation of Han Dynasty. Meanwhile, scholars like Cicero in ancient Rome also proposed the word-for-word translation and sense-for-sense translation. Although the debate has been around for a long time, the two terms was not put forward by American translation theorist L. Venuti until 1995 after the publication of The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. According to Venuti, domestication refers to “an ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to target-language cultural values, bring the author back home”, while foreignization is an ethnodeviant pressure on those (cultural) values to register the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text, sending the reader abroad.” (Venuti 1995:20) Generally speaking, the former emphasizes on the readers of target language in order to achieve communication that does not need great efforts, and the letter puts stress on the writer as well as the culture of source language to keep the origin text still even though it may cause some difficulties in understanding for readers. Different understandings about this two items will reflect diverse national consciousness underground cultures.

Proverbs, as an essential part of language, is defined as “a saying, usually short, that expresses a general truth about life, gives advice, make an observation, or present a teaching in a succinct and memorable way” in The Fact on File Dictionary of Proverbs (2007). When it comes to proverb translation, we should not only pay attention to it unique structure of sentence, but also notice the profound cultural foundation behind it as well as the education function in different proverbs. Choosing the two different approaches between domestication and foreignization to translate proverb, we also expresses our attitudes towards our culture and other nation’s culture. In fact, domestication has another implied meaning in the context of cultural injustice comparing to the other, that is “to tame an animal”. In the context of translation, it refers to the unequal status between “dominant culture” and “dominated culture”. (Venuti 1997:59) Then how to achieve the balance between the two approaches in proverb translation should be taken more seriously in order to reduce cultural asymmetry in China the the West.

Therefore, this paper sets to all kinds of proverbs in China and the West, classifies them into five categories based on Nida’s classification of culture and analyzes the different translation versions on account of domestication and foreiginization so as to reveal the different national awareness behind them.

Theory Foundation

This part aims to introduce the relative literature review of this study, which provides a historical and theoretical view about the several distinctions among domestication and foreignization. Then we will go through the three major arguments about them in Chinese and Western countries. Finally, it’s about the translation study of proverbs that reveal the internal differences between different languages.

Assimilation vs. Alienation and Domestication vs. Foreignization

There exists great similarities between assimilation & domestication and alienation & foreignization. Through distinguishing the differences among them, we can discover so many cultural inequality behind two types of translation.

First of all, it’s the distinction between assimilation and alienation that originated from sociology and philosophy. Assimilation explained in Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English Online refers to the process of becoming an accepted part of a country or group. In the context among different cultures, the assimilation often echoes the process that different individuals or groups merge into the dominant culture in society and gradually lose most of their own cultural characteristics. Therefore, this kind of translation will pay more attention to the target language at the expense of source language’s culture characters. On the contrary, the theory of alienation originated in modern Western philosophy after the Renaissance on which related discussions can be found in social contract theory, Feuerbach and Marx's materialism, etc. Although scholars in different periods have given different interpretations, alienation generally means that two different things still maintain their own characteristics in the process of mutual contact and mutual influence, alienation from each other, or even elimination. Liu Yanli & Yang Zijian (2002) had analyzed its implication in translation and they believed that we should try to involve the original language and culture in the target language and culture during translation. As a result, how to find the balance between source language and target language’s culture is the key point between the study of assimilation and alienation.

Secondly, it’s about domestication and Foreignization that arise later than the distinction above. This two terms first put forward by Lawrence Venuti in his work The Translator’s Invisibility in 1995. In the book, he gained most inspiration from German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher who argued that “there are only two. 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.” (Lefevere 1977:74) Based on his work, Venuti named these two translation methods as domestication and foreignization. The former one refers to “an ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to target-language cultural values, bring the author back home”, while the latter is about “an ethnodeviant pressure on those (cultural) values to register the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text, sending the reader abroad”. (Venuti 1995;20) In other words, domestication emphasizes on “the closest nature equivalence to the source-language message” in Nida’s words (ibid: 159) and freignization focuses on the cultural values of source language even at the cost of losing some readers from the target language.

It’s easy to see the similarities between the two pairs of terms, but the reason why Venuti still proposes domestication and foreignization when the previous pair of terms is present is to distinguish the asymmetry of different cultures behind those translation methods. In summary, to find out the language violence and internally cultural inequality is primary mission for translators whether they choose the way of domestication or the other.

The Main Arguments about Domestication and Foreignization in Chinese and Western Translation History

Looking back in history, the debate about domestication and foreignization has never stopped whether in China or in the West. Then, this paper recalls the major disputes in history to reach a further understanding about the differences between Chinese and Western translation thoughts and cultures.

For one, it can be briefly summarized as three large-scale controversies in Chinese history about these two translation ways(Wang Dongfeng 2002:24), such as the dispute between “text” and “quality” in Buddhist scriptures, arguments between literal translation and free translation from 1920s to 1930s as well as the continuation between domestication and foreignization after 1980s. These two ways alternately play a leading role in the historical stage of Chinese translation, which shows diverse needs for translation in different stages. Sun Zhili (2002) reviewed the previous Chinese literary translation for more than a century and found that the keynote of translation from 1870s to the 1970s was domestication and foreignization had been stressed by the last 20 years of the 20th century in translation circles. He also pointed out that the translation of Chinese literature in the 21th century is still mainly based on foreignization and assisted by domestication if necessary. Now, we generally agree that translation is no a simply conversion among all kinds of languages, but also it involves the various national consciousnesses behind them. As a result, we should try our best to respect the form and author’s writing style of source language. More importantly, we should pay respect to the cultural characteristics of source language and avoid translation errors like “cultural dislocation”.

For another, there are countless discussions in the history of western translation studies and we will focus on three masters among them who are Nida, Even-Zohar and Venuti. We have already analyzed the disparate translation ideas between Nida and Venuti, and the formal could be seen as the representative of domestication and the latter foreignization on the contrary. Then, we come to the polysystem theory proposed by Israeli scholar Even-Zohar. (Even-Zohar 1978) He viewed the domestication and foreignization from a sociological perspective that are determined mainly by the status of a particular culture. To be more specific, the translator should choose the translation of foreignization when the literature of target language occupies a dominant position in the national literature, and vice versa. In this theory, we at least can see the two versions of cultures (strong culture and weak culture) and their statuses keep changing over time. In short, we should take the specific situations of different cultures into consideration no matter what method we choose to translate the texts.

By the several disputes between foreignization and domestication that exist in Chinese and Western history, we can find that both examine the two methods in a very early stage and choose different methods in different historical periods. In terms of future research trends, we tend to more favor the translation idea of foreignization in consideration of cultural equivalence between the source language and the target language, supplementing by domestication if necessary.

The Translation Studies of Proverb

Proverbs, as a modern scholar in paremiology Neal Norrick says, are consistently described as self-contained, pithy, traditional expressions with didactic content and fixed, poetic form. (Neal Norrick 1985) Those words have often been created and used from generation to generation that were full with wisdom and truth we found in our daily life. We can find traces of them in different periods of history, such as Lord John Russell’s words “One man’s wit, and all men’s wisdom”, William Shakespeare’s “Brevity is the soul of wit (1601)”, Alexander Pope’s “Hope springs eternal in the human breast (1733)”, etc. Even well-known individuals like Winston S. Churchill, John F. Kennedy and others have formulated concise and memorable statements that have become proverbial. (Mieder 2009) Therefore, it has great value to do research on proverbs, which can guide us find out so many mysteries in languages. Then, This paper will be focus on the the comparative and contrastive studies between China and Western proverbs.

On the one hand, there are a lot of commonalities between China and Western proverbs. Essentially, they all stem from the same metaphorical thinking of human beings. Even though China and the West have diverse living conditions, cultural backgrounds and so on, we all have the same physical experience or cognitive mechanism in some degree that are summarized into languages as several equivalent proverbs of different nations. For instance, a proverb like “out of sight, out of mind” in western countries has the similar function and form with Chinese proverb of “眼不见，心不烦”. Both are close related with our bodies, then they convey almost the same feelings that we have about nettlesome things. Besides, we also have the similar feelings about a lot of images no matter what country we are in. Take the rat as an example, there is a proverb called “a rat crossing the street is chased by all” in British folklore, and we can also find a close correspondence between it and an ancient Chinese proverb named “老鼠过街人人喊打”. Rats are often regarded as hoodoos in China, Britain and other countries due to their act of stealing, so we will chase and try to kill them when we see them in the street. Hence, all those knowledge that we obtain from the interaction with the world are passed on to the next generation as a form of proverbs. In a word, there exists many analogous proverbs in China and the West as a result of the same body experience and feelings about some things, while we can not ignore the fact that the number of such words are quite limited due to the influence of other factors as follows.

On the other hand, there are more differences existed in Chinese and Western proverbs. We do not create a proverb simply by stacking a set of words, while they are fundamentally inherited in our cultures and every single image in a proverb is actually a symbol reflected the same values in a community. According to Nida (1945), we can distinguish the differently cultural backgrounds between China and the West into five aspects, and there are (1) ecology, (2) material culture, (3) social culture, (4) religious culture, and (5) linguistic culture. This paper will focus on the five angles to make comparative and contrastive studies among China and western countries under the guidance of domestication and foreignization methods of translation.

Comparative Study from Five Cultural Aspects Based on Nida's Theory

In this chapter, comparative analysis is used to find the similarities and differences between Chinese and western proverbs in terms of five aspects. Then, it’s about the selection of dictionaries as the corpus for each proverb. So far, thousands of dictionaries of proverbs have been published in all kinds of languages. For example, James Obelkevich in Proverb and Social History (1987) had mentioned that more than 7,000 proverbs had been collected in Sebastian Frank’s dictionary as early as 1541. Thereinto, all the proverbs analyzed in this paper are selected from the second edition of The Facts on File Dictionary of Proverbs edited by Martin H. Manser in 2007 as the corpus of western proverbs and the Dictionary of Chinese Proverbs edited by Wen Duanzheng in 2011 as the corpus of Chinese proverbs. The origins of examples below are marked by letter M for the first book and letter W for the second book.

Proverb Translation about Ecology

Ecology is often understood as the scientific analysis and study of interactions among organisms and their environment, while it refers to the different regional cultures here. That is to say, the diverse cultures between China and the West are the results of various geographical environments and there is often considerable difficulty in finding some similarities in terms of such ecological features. The main difference between them in this regard could be summarized into one point: China is a landlocked country with obvious “continental attributes” in its culture, while people in most western countries live by ocean that results florid ocean culture of their nations. When it reflects in the proverbs, we can see different images selected by their nations to express the same views. Detailed analysis are showed as follows:

Firstly, it is reflected in the selection about the name of places in proverbs and we would use some places to refer to special things in our cultures.

All roads lead to Rome (M-6);

Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris (M-105);

有眼不识泰山 (W-1271)；

不到长城非好汉 (W-35).

The first proverb is actually a Latin proverb (Mille vie ducunt hominem per secula Romam), referring to that many different ways can lead us achieve the same result. Rome behind it is used to refer the shrine for all people. In the second proverb, Paris is regarded as a kind of paradise by certain Americans and they want to get there even after death. In the following two Chinese proverbs, Mount Tai and the Great Wall are both used as stereotypes of majestic places in the mind of Han people. Regardless of Rome, Paris or Mount Tai, there is nothing in common between the ecology of different nations. If we just translate them simply by replacing with different names of places, such as “All roads lead to the ‘Great Wall’”, it was without a shadow of a doubt that people in China or the western countries would look puzzled facing with the translation. Therefore, foreignization method of translation is more suitable to translate proverbs related to ecology.

Secondly, our understanding about some images may be completely opposite due to climatic variables and domestication of translation is a better choice in such condition. The best example lies in images of east wind and west wind in Chinese and western proverbs.

when the wind is in the east, it is neither for man nor beast (M-297);

春东风，雨祖宗 (W-101).

In this pair of proverb, the opposite perceptions are showed in the different understandings between China and western countries like British. As for people lived in British, the west wind from the Atlantic Ocean is often warm and humid. But when it comes to the east wind, expressions such as words in A Collection of English Proverbs (John Ray 1670) are described as “the east-wind with us is commonly very sharp because it comes off the continent”. So, wind from the west is neither for man nor for beast. On the contrary, east wind from ocean often brings warm breeze and rain in need for Chinese in most places. Therefore, the east-wind is a thing to be grateful for peasants in ancient China and a thing to be disagreeable for people in most western countries. When we encounter with proverbs that carry with such images, translation of domestication will minimize misunderstandings by replaced them with others in their own nations.

Last but not least, proverbs inhering in Chinese farming culture and western marine civilization also differ widely in their preferences of the diverse types. Proverbs about agriculture hold a special places in the history of Chinese paremiology. John S. Rohsenow (2003:xiv) also mentioned that some of the earliest recorded types of proverbs are the so-called “agricultural proverbs” and “weather proverbs”. for instance, Cui Shi first collected this type of proverbs in his book Farmers’ Monthly Guide in the Eastern Han dynasty about eighteen hundred years ago. As a result, proverbs like “春耕宜迟，秋耕宜早 (it is more suitable to start spring ploughing later until the ground is fully thawed and autumn ploughing earlier before the ground is completely frozen. W-101) ” 、“春不种，秋不收 (Without spring sowing, there will be no autumn harvest. J-22)”. similarly as a result of geology, proverbs in most western countries are closely associated with ocean, such as “Little drops of water, little grains of sand, make a mighty ocean and a pleasant land (nothing is too small to be of value. M-172)”、“Many drops of water make an ocean (M-172)”.

All in all, proverbs in China or the West have great variants related to different geographical environments and we should use more proper methods between domestication and foreignization to translate them in order to minimize misunderstanding caused by this factor.

Proverb Translation about Material Culture

Material culture is the physical evidence of a culture in the objects and architecture they make, or have made. In this paper, it also includes all types of animals or other images of nations. As we have know before, different ethnic groups have different living habits and most things they interact with in their daily life will also vary from one into another. This may lead to two consequences in total: the first one is that the most common things in one nation may be not necessary in another; the second one is that the same things or images may result quite opposite understandings in China and the West.

Examples about the first type can be found everywhere in corpus of Chinese and western proverbs. Taking the bread as an example, there are two proverbs about it as follows.

Bread always falls buttered side down (M-32);

Bread is thee soul of wit (M-33).

The first proverb was recorded as early as mid-19th century and appeared in a rhyme written by James Payn (1884). it means that the least desirable of two or more possible outcomes is the one that will occur in any situation. The second one is first recorded in Artachthos, which means that food is essential for survival.