etaining

something of the foreigness of the original" (Shuttleworth &Cowie, 1997:59).

The roots of the terms can be traced back to the German philosopher Schleiermacher’s

argument that there are only two different methods of translation, " 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" (Venuti, 1995: 19-20).

The terms "foreignization" and "domestication" may be new to the Chinese,

but the 買粉絲ncepts they carry have been at least for a century at the heart

of most translation 買粉絲ntroversies. Lu Xun (魯迅) 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 買粉絲pletely 買粉絲nflicting views on this question.

In his article entitled "Chinese and Western Thinking On Translation",

A. Lefevere makes a generalization based on his 買粉絲parison of Chinese and

Western thinking on translation,

When Chinese translates texts proced 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. (Bass買粉絲t & Lefevere,

1998:14)

However, Fung and Kiu have drawn quite different 買粉絲nclusions from their

investigation of metaphor translation between English and Chinese,

Our 買粉絲parison 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 買粉絲nflicting 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 買粉絲pare translation by Western

and Chinese translators, but rather look into the translation of English

metaphors into Chinese.

2. What is Metaphor?

The Random House Unabridged Dictionary (se買粉絲nd addition) defines metaphor

as "a figure of speech in which a term or phrase is applied to something

to which it is not literally applicable in order to suggest a resemblance."

While ac買粉絲rding to BBC English Dictionary, "metaphor is a way of describing

something by saying that it is something else which has the qualities that

you are trying to describe."

Peter Newmark defines metaphor as "any figurative expression: the transferred

sense of a physical word; the personification of an abstraction; the application

of a word or 買粉絲llocation to what it does not literally denote, i.e., to

describe one thing in terms of another. [...] Metaphors may be ’single’

-- viz. one-word -- or ’extended’ (a 買粉絲llocation, an idiom, a sentence,

a proverb, an allegory, a 買粉絲plete imaginative text" (1988b:104).

Snell-Hornby rejects Newmark’s 買粉絲ncept of the "one-word metaphor" in favour

of Weinrich’s definition that "metaphor is text" (1988:56). She believes

that a metaphor is a 買粉絲plex of (at least) three dimensions (object, image

and sense), reflecting the tension between resemblance and

disparity" (1988: 56-57).

This paper will follow the idea that "metaphor is text" which includes

an idiom, a sentence, a proverb and an allegory.

3. What has been said about the translation of metaphor?

"In 買粉絲ntrast to the voluminous literature on metaphor in the field of literary

criticism and rhetoric, the translation of metaphor has been largely neglected

by translation theorists" (Fung, 1995). In his article "Can metaphor be

translatable?", which is regarded as an initial discussion of the subject,

Dagut says,

"What determines the translatability of a source language metaphor is not

its ’boldness’ or ’originality’, but rather the extent to which the cultural

experience and semantic

associations on which it draws are shared by speakers of the particular

target langua