Translator’s (In)visibility in the Chinese Translation of Eat, Pray, Love

The term invisibility was first defined by Lawrence Venuti to “describe the translator’s situation and activity in contemporary Anglo-American culture” (Venuti, 1995/2004) in his book The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. What he put forward together with this term were the two types of translation: domestication and foreignization, which are “culturally variable and historically contingent” rather than in a binary opposition. Drawing on the Chinese translation (《美食，祈祷，恋爱》) of an American memoir Eat, Pray, Love, this essay elaborates on the translator’s visibility and invisibility from both linguistic (lexical and syntactic) and cultural perspectives with analysis on examples. In this absorbing Chinese version, the translator tends to be invisible at syntactic level while visible in relation to cultural perspective as it is easy to follow although “highlights the foreign identity of the ST” (Munday, 2018). The translator could represent the foreignness of the source text in his/her own way, choosing to be either visible or invisible in translation. The case study also suggests that a foreignized translated work, with less idiomatic expressions from linguistic perspective, compared with domesticated translation, can be widely accepted as well as a domesticated one. I hope that the finding of the research may provide a reference to translators and researchers on literary translation and translator’s subjectivity.