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The aim of this paper is to show the limits of Schleiermacher's dichotomy between foreignization and domestication and explore the fuzzy nature of the two concepts, which are in themselves imprecise, adaptable and therefore prone to misunderstanding and manipulation. It is maintained that the attitude towards them is conditioned historically and culturally, depending primarily on how a given community views itself and others and, consequently, on its perceived need for foreign impulses (or lack of it) and its (in)tolerance of them. Given this, the value of the two concepts, which are more than anything else heuristic tools that help us better understand some translation tendencies and their motivations, is relative. It is necessarily determined by the role ascribed to translated texts (or subgroups thereof) in the target culture and by the agenda they are supposed to serve in linguistic, literary, cultural or political terms. Depending on the target circumstances, both approaches can be employed to reinforce the existing state of things or to encourage changes, and both can lead to a translation's success or contribute to its failure.As has been shown by several researchers, there appears, however, to be a basic difference between central and peripheral cultures as far as foreignization and domestication are concerned, at least in the European context. Since peripheral cultures tend to have a greater need for translation than central cultures and are therefore used to continually appropriating foreign models, they are likely to be more open to adopt a variety of translation strategies, foreignizing and domesticating ones, whereas central cultures, which may view themselves as relatively self-sufficient, seem to favour domestication to a greater degree. Among European peripheral cultures (and their literatures), the Slovene culture is a case in point: Slovene target texts tolerate foreignization with relative ease – at least in lexical and rhetorical terms, less so perhaps in syntax – and a foreignizing appropriation of source cultural patterns is a characteristic feature of translations into Slovene. On the other hand, a study of translations of Slovene literature into some central cultures, such as British, French, Italian and German, has revealed that domestication is the prevailing strategy and that the texts which have been received well in the target cultures unfailingly display a target orientation.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-662-47949-0_24

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