At 14:00 pm, October 10, the second academic salon of School of Translation and Interpretation was held in Room JC708. Professor Yi Yong of the Translation Department presented a lecture “Domestication or foreignization: A message or THE message?”.
As pointed out by Professor Yi, Confucius is recognized as one of China's greatest thinkers, educators and philosophers. For more than 2500 years his teachings have been fertile soil for Chinese culture and politics. The Analects of Confucius have conveyed the essentialideas of Confucius in writing down the ages. According to literature, the first English version appeared at the end of the 18th century translated by Carey (1770) and the latest version was translated by Watson in 2009, indicating a continuing interest in these extraordinary texts.
The translations vary in respect of key Chinese culture-loaded words and the English equivalents are categorised by Venuti (1995) as being derived by processes referred to as domestication and foreignization. What is the effect of all this? A message or THE message is conveyed through translation? Professor Yi proposed to examine how Western understanding of - and assumptions about - Chinese culture and thought have been shaped by the effects of various translations of ‘The Analects’ by employing domestication and/or foreignization .
Professor Yi reported on a pilot project, focusing upon English translation of one of the central Confucian ideas, ‘Rén’, which occurs 109 times in The Analects. The project comprises a questionnaire survey of how five different English translations of three major sayings concerning ‘Rén’ are understood by native speakers of English, where the respondents were asked to say what each version means to them. The results were collated and analysed.