I've just made my first discovery in Translation Theory!
I think by their standards, it does look like a minor breakthrough!

Not that I believe no one notices it before me,
but I ain't copying anything. It is totally original.

Foucault wrote that "The task of a translator is not to lead a meaning back to itself or anywhere else; but to use the translated language to derail the translating language."

Then a guy called Antoine Berman also wrote "translating first and foremost means liberating the violence repressed in the original work through a series of intensifications in the translating language (more commonly known as the target language, TL)"

When a foreigner come across an aphorism that he knows in a text, the emotion will be weaker because he has seen that aphorism before. He may even be so familiar about it that he doesn't feel much about the phrase. Yet if the same aphorism is translated into another language, the users of which just didn't have the same concept, so the emotion that comes with it will generally be stronger.

The effect of the same phrase is intensified. Translation in this way never gives the same effect as the original. The original text does not want to surprise the readers, yet readers of the translated texts will feel that surprise!

Translation is supposed to bring the same effect to the readers of the translated text as that the original text had brought the readers of the original. Yet this is just not possible.

This will be the point of my essay! Together with a case study of 錢鍾書's 《圍城》, or Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, things are all but done! 5000 words what?

I can even talk about what translated-out texts mean to locals, like Ch'ien's The Fortress Beseiged~~ Or Louis Cha's The Book and the Sword~~ And I will also mention the particular situation in HK, or any bilingual societies, where people may prefer one language over another for reading experience.

Things I've done the last two weeks just come together all of a sudden!

Well, it does take the genius of Foucault and Breman to help me condense my thoughts.

Suddenly, I am more interested in writing this paper than the thesis.. wakaka!!