Translative Hybridity: Acculturation and Foreignization

Abstract

Another side of wenmingxi’s literary (and performance) hybridity was its general preference for acculturation over foreignization of European and Japanese plays, again the result of the public hybridization process for a professional/commercial theatre that relied on audience acceptance. For mainstream huaju history and translation studies, however, adaptation over translation became another sign of the genre’s impurity. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, for example, defines adaptation as “a set of translative operations which result in a text that is not accepted as a translation but is nevertheless recognized as representing a source text of about the same length.”² Furthermore, it emphasizes that the practice is viewed negatively among “historians and scholars of translation” who reject “the phenomenon as distortion, falsification or censorship.”³ However, as evident from Susan Bassnettt’s argument, the issue of acculturation versus foreignization is far from settled, even in translation studies. Citing France and Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as examples of the opposed approaches, Bassnett argues that either practice is “extensively justified in both intellectual and aesthetic terms.”⁴ In his Scandals of Translation, Lawrence Venuti goes further as to point out that “the translator works in an asymmetrical relationship, always cooperating more with the domestic than the foreign culture and usually with one constituency among others.”⁵

The acculturation versus foreignisation debate has been with us for centuries. Grossly simplified, the issue hinges on whether a translator should seek to eradicate traces of otherness in a text so as to reshape that text for home consumption in accordance with the norms and expectations that prevail in the target system, or whether to opt for a strategy that adheres more closely to the norms of the source system. Acculturation, it can be argued, brings a text more completely into the target system, since that text is effectively aimed at readers with no knowledge of any other system. On the other hand, foreignization ensures that a text is self-consciously other, so that readers can be in no doubt that what they are encountering derives from a completely different system, in short that it contains traces of a foreignness that mark it as distinct from anything produced from within the target culture.

—Susan Bassnett¹