Domestication and Foreignization

It is worthwhile in this context to consider Lawrence Venuti's concepts of ‘domestication' and ‘foreignization' in translation. What the translator does through a free translation is to make the SL text palatable to the TL reader or ‘domesticate' the text by or adding elements so that the text will not look alien to the reader. The opposite of this would be ‘foreignization' where a text is not manipulated to suit TL readership. It retains its ‘foreignness' of content or sentence structures; this is somewhat like Schleiermacher's method where the thorny road between the text and the reader is not smoothed out for easy movement. The reader is forced to adjust to the foreignness of the text. Venuti argues that translations of texts into English tend to be domesticated because of the unequal power dynamics that exist between the Anglo-American English speaking world and the other countries where English is not the language of daily life. However, these texts tend to retain their foreignness when translated into languages other than English, which can also be interpreted as a measure of the lack of confidence of those languages.