DOMESTICATION AND FOREIGNIZATION IN TRANSLATION STUDIES: ON-OFF COGNITIVE TOGGLE OR A CONTINUUM OF THE NATIVE-FOREIGN INTERACTION (PART 1)
Abstract
The given paper consists of two parts and deals with the contemporary issues of translation studies. An attempt is made to comprehend the translation process and translator’s subjectivity through the lens of Anthropo-Chthulucene theory. One of the most cutting-edge and influential trends in modern humanities, ecocritical and philosophical studies. The first part of the research is devoted to an attempt to create a peculiar interrelation between fundamental translation notions of domestication and foreignization and contemporary posthuman paradigms, within which thinking extends far beyond anthropocentric boundaries where the human being is regarded as the measure of the Universe. In the course of investigation, the genealogical perspective enables the illustration of the evolution of key terms employed in our scientific work. The conceptual shades of their meaning in different scientific contexts are outlined. It is suggested that with each subsequent study of native and foreign phenomena (i.e. ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignsation’) in translation, the research focus has been gradually shifting towards tolerance and hospitality to otherness: from the ethics of foreignness and the preservation of alterity as a challenge → to the politicization of translation and foreignization as resistance to ethnocentrism → to narrativity and re-narration where domestication aligns with conformism and foreignization with its opposition → to translation as an interwoven process, where a translator acts as an agent of cultural memory and change. It is assumed that the mental shift towards multi-species partnership has rapidly altered the ontological principles of translation studies. It is argued that its present dimension lies within the realm of global cene-concepts that form a fractal anti-matrix of posthuman world perception. Such flexibility and vitality neutralize traditional matrix’s fixedness and are calibrated by the poles of the native (domestication) and the foreign (foreignization). It is summarized that under such circumstances, the translator’s subjectivity inevitably requires some features of transversality. That is a meta-skill that enables the construction of qualitatively new translation trajectories, the crossing of boundaries of norms, levels, and systems, moving vertically (to domesticate), horizontally (to foreignize), or chaotically in all directions, synthesizing heterogenous elements of the native and the foreign on the way to new synergies. It is concluded that, through the polyphonic lens of modernity, domestication and foreignization are not opposing camps but two poles of a single continuum, between which the translator navigates depending on purpose, genre, time, place, audience, ethical and political prerequisites, and the applied content of each ‘cene’.
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