Domestication of Source Texts in Literary Translation Prevails over Foreignization

Domestication is a translation theory in which the source text (to be translated) is matched to the foreign reader by erasing its original linguistic and cultural difference. This match aims at making the target text (translated text) more fluent. On the contrary, foreignization is a translation theory in which the foreign reader is matched to the source text. The paper explores mathematically the degree of domestication/foreignization in current translation practice of texts written in alphabetical languages. A geometrical representation of texts, based on linear combinations of deep−language parameters, allows: (a) to calculate a domestication index which measures how much domestication is applied to the source text; (b) to distinguish language families. An expansion index measures the relative spread around mean values. The paper reports statistics and results on translations of: (a) Greek New Testament books in Latin and in 35 modern languages; (b) English novels in western languages. English and French, although attributed to different language families, mathematically almost coincide. The requirement of making the target text more fluent makes domestication, with varying degree, universally adopted, so that a blind comparison of the same linguistic parameters of a text and its translation hardly indicates they refer to each other.