Are Readers Lost in the Foreign Land? Investigating the Impact of Foreignised Translation in Guangzhou Yong Zhong University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia Jie Lin Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China This paper reports on a translation impact study project in the Chinese city of Guangzhou. The project involved firstly presenting two renditions (presumably a foreignised one and a domesticated one) of one and the same English source text to a group of subjects and inviting them to respond to 10 preconceived statements about each rendition. Their responses were then statistically processed in order to answer these two research questions: (1) are the responses to the two renditions significantly different? and (2) if so, are there any significant correlations between responses to statements about the same rendition? The first half of this paper deals with the research design of the study, while the second half discusses its findings. With this study, we hope to contribute to an enhanced understanding of the impact of foreignised and domesticated translations  in this case on Chinese readers. doi: 10.2167/pst001.0 Keywords: translation impact studies, exoticism, foreignisation, domestication, the familiar foreign, the foreign familiar Introduction The present study was inspired by an earlier impact study of 35 university students conducted in the Chinese capital of Beijing in 2005 (Zhong et al., forthcoming). 1 In that study, little evidence was found to substantiate hypotheses that, between a domesticated and foreignised rendition, one would be seen as more cognitively accessible, more reader-friendly or more indicative of a good writer, a good book or a developed/civilised society than the other. It was also found that the rendition categorised as ‘domesticated’ by other scholars had seemed foreignised to some subjects. Likewise, the ‘foreignised’ rendition was considered domesticated by certain subjects. Reflections on the Beijing findings helped to set the research orientation of our investigation. Domestication and foreignisation are usually conceived as two distinct styles of translation and, according to Schleiermacher (1813/1992), involve either moving the author towards the reader or vice versa. These opposite styles present a choice of great consequence as, according to Lu (1991), they mean either shutting out the foreign culture or reforming the local culture. Venuti (1995) views them in a postcolonial context, where domestication 0907-676X/07/01 001-14 $20.00/0 – 2007 Y. Zhong & J. Lin Perspectives: Studies in Translatology Vol. 15, No. 1, 2007 1