Long time after their first use by Friederich Schleiermacher, the concepts of naturalization and alienation have been taken up by Lawrence Venuti (1995) in translation theory and renamed as domestication and foreignisation. The two concepts are based on the idea that the culture of the original text has to be approached in some way in the process of translation, either by adapting it to the context of the target language (domestication) or by adapting the target language to the context of the source text (foreignisation). As Lawrence Venuti claims, translations usually end up as: “an ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text [i.e. domestication] or an ethnodeviant pressure on those [target-language] values to register the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text [i.e. foreignisation]” (Venuti, 1995, p. 20).

Both strategies have been criticized: domestication for betraying the culture of the source text, foreignisation for its elitistic touch (Robinson 1997, 109-112). Foreignisation can also be used to highlight the foreign identity of the source text and protecting it from the ideological dominance of the target culture, which is one of Venuti's concerns.

In this paper, I will analyze some details of the translation of Mircea Cartarescu's novels from Romanian into Swedish in order to see if they can be classified according to the dichotomy domestication/foreignisation. I will also try to broaden the analysis by discussing the implications of the strategies which are used, especially when it comes to the reception of Cartarescu in Sweden.