Are readers lost in the foreign land? Investigating the impact of foreignised translation in Guangzhou

Abstract

This paper reports on a translation impact study project in the Chinese city of Guangzhou. The project involved firstly presenting two renditions (presumably a foreignised one and a domesticated one) of one and the same English source text to a group of subjects and inviting them to respond to 10 preconceived statements about each rendition. Their responses were then statistically processed in order to answer these two research questions: (1) are the responses to the two renditions significantly different? and (2) if so, are there any significant correlations between responses to statements about the same rendition? The first half of this paper deals with the research design of the study, while the second half discusses its findings. With this study, we hope to contribute to an enhanced understanding of the impact of foreignised and domesticated translations - in this case on Chinese readers.