On “ strategy ” as the pivotal concept in transfer operations

No consensus has been reached on an umbrella term for covering various macroand microtransfer operations in translating in the field of translation Studies. Writers have offered a wide spectrum of terminologies of their own for the operations in the past decades. This paper first discusses the reasons for use of “strategy” from a dictionary-based translational perspective. Then, it deals with the global strategies, such as literal/free translation and foreignizing/domesticating translation, analyzing the similarities and differences between the four categories. Finally, the paper summarizes the specific foreignizing/domesticating translation strategies on the basis of Venuti’s 1998 entry on “strategies of translation” in Routledge Encylopedia of translation Studies, with a supplementation of some other strategies.


INTRODUCTION
Which term can be used to cover Cicero's word-for-word translation, Jerome's sense-for-sense translation, Xuanzang's bufan (不翻, zero translation), or John Dryden's metaphrase, compromise and imitation?No consensus has so far been reached in the field of translation studies with regard to a proper concept for encompassing these classical writers' nomenclatures for translation operations.In the sections that follow, we will discuss the concept of "strategy", reasons for use of the term, types of translation strategies and the similarities and differences between literal/free translation and foreignizing/domesticating translation.

Conceptual inconsistency
The relatively "old" term used to describe how translators handle the source text and create the target text seems to be a "method" (Methode in German) employed by Schleiermacher (2006).In the past few decades, scholars have used different terms to mean something similar, such as "mode" (MacFarlane, 1953), "procedure" (procédé) (Vinay and Darbelnet, 1958;Newmark 1988), "technique" (Nida 1964;Newmark 1982;Fawcett, 1997;Molina and Albir, 2002), "shift" (Catford, 1965;Leuven-Zwart, 1989/1990), "strategy" (Lefevere, 1975;Chesterman, 1997Chesterman, /2005;;Venuti 1998), "form" (Holmes, 1988), "trajection" (Malone, 1988), "solution" (Zabalbeascoa, 2000;Pym, 2011), and so on.What a conceptual or terminological mess (Chesterman, 2005;Pym, 2011)!In discussing literal translation, Shuttleworth and Moira (1997: 96) call it both a "strategy" and a "technique".It is absolutely necessary to sort out the mess and settle on a term or a set of terms to cover the overall process of translating, from selection of the source text to macro-and micro-operative procedures of actual translating, including the general orientation of translation in handling the whole source text and local operations in dealing with a word, phrase, sentence and sub-text (example, an epistolary text) in the source text.Our discussion will be restricted to English-language research that has been published over the past five or six decades.

Reasons for use of strategy
Of the terms employed by translation scholars in recent decades, Macfarlane's "mode" is used loosely in a very general sense to refer to such global translation orientations as actual translation, ideal translation or literal translation (Hermans, 2004: 17 to 21).The concept of "procedure" proposed by Vinay and Darbelnet seems to describe various kinds of resulting differences between source and target texts, rather than real procedures taking place through time (Chesterman, 2005: 19)."Technique" focuses on local operations, especially in Molina and Albir (2002) who have summarized 18 techniques, such as adaptation, amplification, borrowing, calque and so on.
"Shifts" are defined by Catford (1965: 73) as "departures of formal correspondence"; they are in nature a kind of dissimilarity or difference obtained by comparison of source and target texts.Therefore, it is a generic textual term covering all kinds of changes that has taken place in the translation product.The research paradigm focusing on shifts seems to take formal correspondence/equivalence or literal translation as a default (that is, natural) tool that is self-evident in translation practice and that need not be studied.The underlying assumption relating to the terms like "procedure", "shift", "technique", "solution", and so on, is that literal word-for-word translation or formal correspondence is a kind of mechanical operation that is so easy that even a machine can do it.Nothing deserves scholarly research in this kind of default translation activity, which is deeply rooted in the belief that the target text, of course, should be faithful or equivalent to the source text.
"Strategy" is a term preferred by many scholars, most notably Lefevere (1975), Chesterman (1997Chesterman ( /2005) ) and Tian 107 Venuti (1998).In discussing poetry translation, Lefevere proposes seven strategies, such as translation of poetry into prose.Clearly, his concept of "strategy" works at the global level.Chesterman (1997: 94-112) develops the term as referring to various local procedures, including syntactic, semantic and pragmatic strategies.Venuti combines global and local procedures into a concept of "strategy" that is manifested in the selection of a source text and the determination of the overall method for it, as well as such specific methods as explanation, addition and replacement in turning it into the target text (Venuti 1998: 240-244).James Holmes' "form" is interpreted as "strategy" by Shuttleworth and Moira (1997: 106).True, his "form" is indeed a kind of global strategy.For example, among the four forms of verse translation proposed by him, mimetic form is the one in which the form of the source text is retained in the target text."Trajection" does not seem to be popularly adopted by translation researchers in mainstream translation studies today.According to Malone (1988: 15), trajection contains a number of basic translation patterns into which a given source-target pairing may partially be solved, such as amplification, reduction, reordering, and so on.It is something like Molina and Albir's "technique".
"Solution" is the nominalization of the verb "to solve", thus enabling a possibility of understanding it as a process or result.It can be used to deal with the description of the translation outcome or with the reformulation of the actual translating process.Some researchers (Zabalbeascoa 2000;Pym 2011) like to use "solution" or "solution type" to describe the actual translation product.Translators will inevitably encounter problems in the process of translating and they have to find methods or techniques or follow procedures to solve them.It can be argued that "solution" presupposes a problem and thus is naturally associated with problem-solving.However, a solution is not the method itself, even though the former is related to the latter in that a method or a set of methods are used in order to solve a problem.We need a term to describe a wide range of translating operations, from selection of the source text to local procedures in rendering it.It seems that "strategy", "method", "technique", "procedure", "solution" and "shift" are used with high frequency nowadays in the field of translation studies.Therefore, it is rational to choose and determine term(s) from among them.Let us first look at their definitions in non-technical everyday English. 1) Strategy: A plan of action designed to achieve a longterm or overall aim.2) Method: A particular procedure for accomplishing or approaching something, especially a systematic or established one.3) Technique: A way of carrying out a particular task, especially the execution or performance of an artistic work or a scientific procedure.4) Procedure: An established or official way of doing something.5) Solution: A means of solving a problem or dealing with a difficult situation.6) Shift: A slight change in position, direction, or tendency.
The definitions might elicit various presuppositions from advocates of the terms."Strategy" implies that translation is a kind of cognitive activity that achieves a goal."Method" and "procedure" suggest that translation has some laws or rules for translators to obey, such as literal translation that may be viewed as an "established" translating rule for translation practitioners."Technique" might indicate that translation is an art."Solution" and "shift" imply that only studies focusing on problems or difficulties in translating are of some value.However, ways of actual translating go beyond those to deal with problems and difficulties.
If we look at the terms from a textual perspective, strategy seems to be at global level, technique at local level, and method in between.Procedure, solution and shift may be used at different levels.If we do choose an umbrella term to include all kinds of operations in a specific translation event, "strategy" seems to be the most general term.It is a plan of action(s) whose implementation requires the making of methods or techniques that are called "tactics" in the military field.In other words, a strategy contains a set of methods or techniques that may be established or provisional, and that are used to deal with easy or difficult things to achieve the expected or unexpected result.Therefore, strategy is indirectly linked with procedure, solution and shift.In our opinion, "strategy" can be adopted to mean a general or specific plan of action(s) used to achieve a certain goal or solve a certain problem by the translator with an objective.Pym's (2011: 92-93) definition of "strategy" seems to be scientific and thus can be accepted by translation scholars: A strategy is better seen as an action that aims to achieve a purpose where: a) There is no certainty of success (that is, it is not a mechanistic application of a rule), and b) There are viable alternative actions (that is, other ways of aiming to achieve the same or similar purpose).

Types of translation strategies
Along the line, prescribed by the concept of "strategy" in the above section, various kinds of classifications of translatorial actions under different nomenclatures may be viewed as those of translation strategies.According to John Kearns (2009: 282 to 285), translation strategies may be grouped into such big dichotomous categories as literal/free translation, local/global strategies, comprehension/production strategies and domesticating and foreignizing strategies, certainly also including strategies concerning selection of source texts.The categories can be sub-divided.For example, Vinay and Darbelnet's procedures, Nida's techniques of adjustment, Catford's shifts and Malone's trajections are all of production strategies.Confronted with so many confusing divisions of translation strategies, we will mainly refer to Venuti's and Chesterman's classifications of strategies.

Literal vs. foreignizing translation and free vs. domesticating translation
It seems necessary to make a distinction between two pairs of strategies, namely free/literal translation and domesticating/foreignizing translation.There is a misunderstanding in the field of translation teaching and research in China that some students and even teachers identify literal translation with foreignizing translation and free translation with domesticating translation.But a logical distinction of them presupposes a good command of their definitions and features.

Features of domesticating/foreignizing translation
For Vennuti (1998: 241 to 242), free translation may lead to domesticating translation and literalism leads to a foreignizing translation.However, they are not the same thing.A domesticating translation, as Venuti (1998: 240) implies, "conforms to values currently dominating the target-language culture, taking a conservative and openly assimilationist approach to the foreign text, appropriating it to support domesticating canons, publishing trends, political alignments", while a foreignizing translation, on the other hand, "resists and aims to revise the dominant by drawing on the marginal, restoring foreign texts excluded by domestic canons, recovering residual values such as archaic texts, translation methods, and cultivating emergent ones".
One of our previous studies on domesticating/ foreignizing translation shows that, with regard to its etymological meanings of taming wild plants/animals or converting humans, "domestication seems to mean that a lower-class species is upgraded to an upper-class species and an outsider is turned to an insider" (Tian 2010: 81).As far as domestication in translation is concerned, it has several metaphorical meanings.First, the author, the source text and the source culture are like Translation usually involves the transfer of a text from one place to another except for a bilingual/multilingual community (example, Hong Kong) where translation may be done for those who know only one of the languages used in the community.When a text leaves its own language-culture environment for another languageculture environment, its relation to its own environment will be severed because the language in which it was written has been replaced by another language, namely the target or receiving language.The target language is not necessarily related to the source-language culture but intimately to its own culture.In other words, the language replacement is a kind of domestication.Weng Xianliang (1983: 135), a late Chinese scholar and translator, points out that translation from a foreign language to Chinese, in some sense, is a kind of sinocization.True, most words and expressions in a language contain some historical residues of their own culture.When target language readers read the translated text, some words and expressions will remind them of something in their own history or culture.This kind of linguistic variation cannot be avoided and may be labeled "passive domestication".
"Active domestication" does not link with the use of language, but with the translator's attitude and purpose, which may be regarded as another metaphorical meaning of domestication for translation.Domesticating animals involves moral training.Translation also concerns a moral attitude taken by a translator.It is almost impossible for a translator to take a neutral stance, neither source-biased nor target-biased.Venuti points out that adoption of domestication or foreignization, in its final analysis, is a moral attitude (Guo, 2009: 35).The translator's attitude toward the source text is influenced by their purpose.Domestication and foreignization are directional.They are like equivalence in translation (Pym 1998).When we mention equivalence, it usually means that the target text is equivalent to the source text, not vice versa.
Otherwise, it cannot be called a translation.Domestication and foreignization revolve around the target text rather than the source text.The target text's swaying to the source language and culture (SLC) or to the target language and culture (TLC) determines whether it is a domesticating or foreignizing translation.The directionality of domestication and foreignization may be illustrated in Figure 1.Domestication and foreignization are mutually convertible.Whether it is domestication or foreignization is determined by one's perspective.Suppose that you were a Chinese who lived in England for some years.
You began to speak English, eat the local food, wear the local clothes, follow the local customs and even think like a native in England.We Chinese people would say that you had been foreignized.But English people would say that you had been domesticated.In the case of translation, target language readers will say that a translated text with strong target language-culture characteristics is a domesticating translation.If the target text keeps the source language-culture characteristics, target-language readers will feel that it looks exotic and will claim that it is a foreignizing translation.In the circles of translation studies, it seems that researchers always put themselves in the shoes of target-language readers when they talk about domestication and foreignization, which has almost become a default discourse for translation scholars.However, we need to know that they are convertible to each other.That is to say, a domesticating translation for target-language readers will become a foreignizing translation for source-language readers, and vice versa.
Domestication and foreignization are quantitative and qualitative.Various kinds of translation strategies, such as foreignization and domestication, or literal translation and free translation, coexist in many translations.In this case, we can only claim that these translations are more domesticating or more foreignizing.In other words, quantitative analysis of the use of domestication and foreignization in rendering items in the source language can help consolidate a qualitative analysis which, in turn, can convincingly decide the inclination of a translator in employing them to render a certain text.Both strategies are multi-layered.They deal with both macro-and microstructures of the source text.Before translating, the translator will decide on their general strategy.In Schleiermacher's words, they have to decide to bring the author to the reader or to bring the reader to the author (Robinson 2006: 229).Or they choose to stand in between in the case of somewhat balanced employment of the strategies in translating.Schleiermacher's indication of the existence of the distance between the author and the reader implies the degree and process of domestication and foreignization.The distance can be short or long, which determines that the extent of the strategies varies.But they are not specific translation techniques.They are achieved by various techniques or substrategies, such as addition, omission, substitution for domestication and sound-retained transliteration, meaning-retained loan translation, form-retained transplantation for foreignization.Like domesticating wild plants and animals, domestication and foreignization involve a process of transforming the source text into the target text in terms of textual micro-and macrostructures.The destination of the process is a product that may be labeled a domesticating or foreignizing translation.

Features of free/literal translation
Literal translation is a translation "made on a level lower than is sufficient to convey the content unchanged while observing targeted language (TL) norms" (Barkhudarov 1969: 10, quoted in Shuttleworth andMoira 1997: 95).In other words, literal translation, including word-for-word translation, revolves around the representation of literal meanings of individual words, phrases and sentences as well as the preservation of the word order in the source text.Free translation, on the other hand, is "a type of translation in which more attention is paid to producing a naturally reading TT than to preserving the ST wording intact" (ibid.: 62).It is also known as sense-for-sense translation.It focuses on the reproduction of the true meaning in the original without much consideration of keeping the source-text form, including literal meaning and word order.A simple distinction between literal/free translation may be made as follows: if form and meaning cannot be retained at the same time, a literalist will choose to preserve the former, while a free-hander will tend to reproduce the latter.
However, Professor Douglas Robinson (Baker, 1998: 87-90) combines word-for-word translation (that is, literal translation) and sense-for-sense translation into the concept of faithful translation.Free translation, according to Robinson's examination of translation discourse in human history, is actually an unfaithful translation or an imitation because such translation goes against some hegemonic tradition or norm.In the second edition of Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (Baker and Saldanha, 2008), both entries of free/literal translation have been omitted.The reason for the omission might be that they are conceptually too vague, loose, dynamic and controversial.But we have to look them in the face because translators have been using them to talk about their translations throughout history.
It might be advisable to adopt the definitions of free/ literal translation by Shuttleworth and Moira (2004).It might also be of some help in understanding the terms if we refer to the definitions offered by the contemporary Chinese dictionary (1999).According to it, literal translation refers to a kind of translation in which more attention is given to the preservation of literal meanings of words and syntactic structures of sentences in the source text (1999: 1615), while free translation is a kind of translation that is done according to the general meaning of the original but not word for word and sentence for sentence (1999: 1496).They are basically what Chinese translators mean by literal or free translation.

Relations between free/literal translation and domesticating/foreignizing translation
As for the relationship between literal translation and foreig-nizing translation, some writers hold that foreignness or strangeness is achieved through literalism (Shuttleworth and Moira, 1997: 96;Robinson, 1998: 127), but nobody, to our knowledge, has so far discussed the relationship between free translation and domesticating translation.
In our view, a literal translation is not necessarily a foreignizing translation.It can become a foreignizing translation only when target readers feel that the target text has a strange effect or an exotic flavor.Likewise, a free translation that is restricted to sense-for-sense translation is not a domesticating translation.It is domesticating translation only when target readers feel the unique color and flavor of their own language-culture from the target text.In other words, if free/literal translation makes target readers feel linguistically and culturally novel or unaccustomed to it, all translations of such kind may be seen as a kind of foreignization.In a similar vein, if target readers feel that a free or literal translation is familiar and natural, with no sense of distance in language and culture, it can be taken as a type of domestication.

Foreignizing and domesticating strategies
A careful examination of Venuti's (1998: 240 to 244) discussion of "strategies of translation" in the first edition of Routledge encyclopedia of translation studies indicates that, as strategies, domestication and foreignization are umbrella terms that can be further divided into substrategies.Let us first read some segments of the entry about the strategies and then summarize the specific strategies in them.

Statements on domesticating strategies
1) Domesticating strategies have been implemented at least since Rome, as Nietzsche remarked, "translation was a form of conquest" and Latin poets like Horace and Propertius translated Greek texts "into the Roman present": they had no time for all those very personal things and names and whatever might be considered the costume and mask of a city, a coast, or a country" (Nietzsche 1974:137).As a result, Latin translators not only deleted culturally specific markers but also added allusions to Roman culture and replaced the name of the Greek poet with their own, passing the translation off as a text originally written in Latin.(Venuti 1998: 240 to 241) 2) Nicolas Perrot D'ablancourt (see French Tradition), a prolific French translator of Greek and Latin, argued that the elliptical brevity of Tacitus's prose must be rendered freely, with the insertion of explanatory phrases and the deletion of digressions, so as "to avoid offending the delicacy of our language and the correctness of reason" (1640: preface; translated).

Segments on domesticating/foreignizing strategies
The distinction between their strategies is particularly The key words in the above segments that directly or indirectly indicate some kind of strategy have been put in bold face.As Venuti suggests, domestication includes such global and local strategies as deletion, addition, replacement, free translation, insertion, explanation, genre switching, modernizing and assimilation.Foreignization is related to strategies like literal translation, introduction of new literary forms, archaizing, use of nonstandard dialects, and retention of differences.The one strategy may not be unique to or exclusively belong to domestication or foreignization.For example, addition, as a local strategy, may be domesticating or foreignizing.
The criterion for judging whether a strategy is domesticcating or foreignizing is whether it signifies canonical or marginal values in the target language-culture, which is the basis for Venuti's classification of domesticating and foreignizing strategies.As for the use of archaic terms, it is thought that we should distinguish them from culturespecific expressions that may be archaic in that they were produced long ago.The latter show the tendency of the target text to privilege the target culture.Therefore, use of archaisms may be an indication of domestication.It is not necessarily to "invite the recognition that it is a translation produced in a different culture at a different period" (Venuti 1998: 244).We do not think it is scientific to establish a correspondence between archaizing/ modernizing and foreignization/ domestication.In some sense, almost all translations are intended for contemporary readers and thus they have to use modern language.This kind of universal should not be seen as part of a type of translation strategies in terms of its general tendency in human translation practices.It might be advisable if domestication and foreignization were restricted to the ways in which differences in language and culture are handled.As for selection of the source text, the strategy is not self-evident, nor can it be described by a key word or phrase.It can only be determined by placing the translator's choice in the proper cultural context where the target text is produced.Hermans (2006) points out that the "precariousness and insecurity" of translation studies as an academic discipline, are due to its lack of large-scale encyclopedic reference works and comprehensive historical studies, as well as disputes on some basic issues in the discipline.In our opinion, the terminological or conceptual mess with regard to transfer operations as one of the most basic element in translation studies will prevent it from developing into a mature, widely recognized science in the academic community, although a few scholars, such as Shuttleworth and Moira, have devoted their endeavors in this respect.In a word, "strategy" can be used as the central or general concept in describing the way the target text is turned out on both global and local levels, because its basic meaning is roughly in agreement with the features of transfer operations.
(ibid: 241) 3) Under D'Ablancourt's influence, the English translator Sir John Denham (see British tradition) rendered Book 2 of Aeneid in heroic couplets […].In domesticating foreign texts D'Ablancourt and Denham did not only simply modernize them […].(ibid: 241) 4) The multi-volume English version of Freud's texts known as the standard edition (1953-74) assimilated his ideas to the positivism dominating the human sciences […].(ibid: 241) Segments on foreignizing strategies 1) From its origins in the German tradition, foreignizing translation has meant a close adherence to the foreign text, a literalism that resulted in the importation of foreign cultural forms […].Johann Heinrich Voss's hexameter versions of the Odyssey (1781) and the Iliad (1793) introduced this prosodic form into German poetry […].Friedrich Hölderlin's translations of Sophocles' Antigone and Oedipus Rex (1804) draw on archaic and nonstandard dialects […].(ibid: 242)2) Nott rejected the "fastidious regard to delicacy" that might have required him to delete the explicit sexual references in Catullus' poems, because he felt that "history should not be falsified" (1795: x).(ibid: 243)