On December, 18th, hosted by the School of Interpreting and Translation Studies, the lecture titled “the Lingnan Translation Salon and the Translation Frontier” was presented at 2:30 p.m. in Room 424 of the Fourth Teaching Building. As a famous scholar in the translation arena, Professor Sun Yifeng from Lingnan University in Hong Kong, was invited to give us a lecture on foreignization and authenticity of translation.
At the beginning of the lecture, Professor Sun pointed out that the meaning of authenticity is ambiguous and authenticity is one of the ultimate goals in translation although it is impossible to reach absolute authenticity. He also mentioned that foreignization is the very translation strategy that can best reflect the authenticity of translation because its purpose is to teach people new things rather than consolidate their understanding of the things known.
Then he expounded over the relationship between “difference” and “authenticity”. According to him, the existence of “authenticity” has been deconstructed to a large extent in face of the trend of deconstruction. But he also mentioned that “authenticity” still exists under certain conditions and we should realize the existence of “difference” and its dialectical relationship with “authenticity” at the same time. In addition, Professor Sun said that translation should be communicative, but some foreignization translation is not and it can not convey “authenticity” although it could have many accurate annotations because its language is unnatural and implicit. In contrast, some explicit translation weakens the complexity of the source text, which actually fails to convey its “authenticity”. In light of the complication of translation process, he concluded that translation is virtually a game between possibility and impossibility, authenticity and unauthenticity, derivation and creation.
Subsequently, Professor Sun pointed out that foreignization is closely related to cultural authenticity and it is an effective way to reproduce the source text authentically, avoiding losing or undermining the cultural identity of the source text.
The last part of the lecture was for Professor Sun to answer questions from the audience. The present teachers and students raised various questions for him, including the relationships between “authenticity” and “faithfulness” proposed by Yan Fu as well as “creation”, and the difference between “foreignization” and “alienation”… He responded to these questions one by one patiently. For the first question, he mentioned the deficiencies of “faithfulness” as the translation criterion. To answer the second question, he said that sometimes the creation of translators happened to reflect the “authenticity” of translation. As to the third problem, Professor Sun adopted vivid examples to illustrate that the ultimate goal of foreignization is to enable readers to savor the foreign cultures and contexts while alienation still sticks to exoticism between readers and foreign cultures.
After the question-and-answer phase, the lecture was ended with warm applaud from the present audience. Professor Sun left us a deep impression with his in-depth studies on foreignization and authenticity of translation.
