How Lin Yutang's Cultural Identity Influences His Translation

This thesis is intended to explore how Lin Yutang's cultural identity influences his translation process by means of investigating his cultural identity construction.As a unique and important character in Chinese translation history, Lin devotes his whole life to translation practice and writing in English, and makes a unique contribution to transmitting Chinese culture to the West by making use of his unique cultural identity. He reckons himself as "a pile of paradoxes" which can be regarded as the definition of his own cultural identity. This thesis mainly holds that Lin's unique cultural identity is a mixture of Western and traditional Chinese cultures, which is a result of an unceasing construction with changes in social, historical and cultural context. And his unique cultural identity has a great impact on his translation, esp. his translation motivation, choice of the source texts and translation strategies.This thesis is composed of four chapters:Chapter 1 is an introduction, including a detailed literature review on cultural identity and Lin's cultural identity.Chapter 2 first discusses the two periods of Lin's cultural identity construction. And then, based on the characteristics of his cultural identity construction, Lin's translation activity is divided into three periods, and how Lin's unique cultural identity influences his translation in different periods is to be explained in detail.Chapter 3 tries to explore how Lin's cultural identity influences his translation methods by analyzing the translations of some sentences and cultural-specific items in his translated work Six Chapters of a Floating Life.In Chapter 4, the author summarizes of the influences of Lin's unique cultural identity construction on his translation, and suggests that the studies on the translator's cultural identity will be significant to the translation studies in the future.