The Impact of Domestication and Foreignization on Comprehensibility of Translations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Abstract

Venuti (1995) defines domesticating translation as “a replacement of the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text with a text that is intelligible to the target-language reader”, and foreignizing translation as “a translation that indicates the linguistic and cultural differences of the text by disrupting the cultural codes that prevail in the target language.” The present study attempts to investigate two translations of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, to discover the relationship between domestication and comprehensibility of the text through comparing the frequency of domestication and foreignization translation strategies employed by two different translators: Pirzad and Soleymani. Since Pirzad presented a more domesticated translation, one group of subjects were provided with her translation, and the other with the translation of Soleymani who was more interested in foreignizing. After administering comprehensibility test and analyzing the results through t-test, it was revealed that the group of subjects who had received Pirzad's translation came up with better scores and also there was a significant relationship between domestication and comprehensibility of the children at 0.01 level of significance.