To Foreignize or To Domesticate

efines 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 according 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 collocation 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 collocation, an idiom, a sentence, a proverb, an allegory, a complete imaginative text" (1988b:104). Snell-Hornby rejects Newmark’s concept of the "one-word metaphor" in favour of Weinrich’s definition that "metaphor is text" (1988:56). She believes that a metaphor is a complex 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 contrast 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 language" (1976). Snell-Hornby takes metaphor translation in the light of the integrated approach. She says that The sense of the metaphor is frequently culture-specific, [...] Whether a metaphor is ’translatable’ (i.e. whether a literal translation could recreate identical dimensions), how difficult it is to translate, how it can be translated and whether it should be translated at all cannot be decided by a set of abstract rules, but must depend on the structure and function of the particular metaphor within the text concerned ". (1988: 56-9) van den Broeck conceives the treatment of metaphors as a functional relevancy to the communicative situation (1981). Mary Fung also considers translating metaphor as a communicative event which is both interlingual and intercultural (1995). Different from the semantic, cultural and functional perspectives mentioned above, Newmark holds a more pragmatic approach. Drawing on his practical experience, he proposes several procedures for translating metaphor: (1) Reproducing the same image in the target language; (2) Replacing the SL image with another established TL image; (3) Replacing the metaphor by simile; (4) Retaining the metaphor and adding the sense; (5) Converting the metaphor to sense; (6) Omitting the metaphor if it is redundant. Discussions of the subject, especially those written in Chinese, are also pragmatic rather than theoretical. In E-C Translation Coursebook (1980 ) which is the most widely used translation textbook in China, Zhang Peiji (张培基) and his co-compilers summarized three popular methods for translating metaphors: (1) Literal translation (similar to Newmark’s first procedure); (2) Replacing the SL image with a standard TL image (similar to Newmark’s second procedure); (3) Converting the metaphor to sense (Same as Newmark’s fifth procedure). Based on the methods suggested by Zhang and