A Descriptive Study Of The Chinese Versions Of My Country And My People Under The Perspective Of Polysystem Theory

There are two popular versions of Lin Yutang's My Country and My People in the mainland, which are first produced by Huang Jiade in1936as well as Hao Zhidong and Shen Yihong in1988respectively. Huang's version was reprinted in2006and the other was in2007. However, previous researches emphasize on the discussion of source content or writers'opinions, or the evaluation of which version is good or bad, or even some scholars misunderstand that the book is written in Chinese by Lin Yutang and analyze his linguistic style. Consequently, all those researches cannot provide a deeper understanding of translation activities and more objective and comprehensive evaluation to translators and their translated works. Therefore, it is necessary to correct misunderstandings and have a descriptive study of the two Chinese versions in order to enrich the researches of Lin Yutand and his works.Assisted by Zohar's hypothesis of the position of translated literature within the literary polysytem as well as Toury's discussion of translation norms, this thesis takes the two Chinese versions of Lin Yutang's My Country and My People as research object, and put them into the contemporary socio-cultural context for investigation, aiming at exploring the social factors that restrict translators'activities during the1930's and1980's. In other words, the translators'activities are influenced by the different positions of translate literature of the day within Chinese literary polysystem at the macro level and restricted by initial norm, preliminary norm and operational norm at the micro level. Lastly, this thesis draws a conclusion that the translators of the two versions are influenced and restricted by the target culture at that time in the process of translation, thus their translation is in accordance with the translation norms of the day. Therefore, researches on literature translation activities should take those social factors and certain translation norms formed during certain periods into consideration. Besides, what kinds of the previous and present norms can easily get success need to be summarized and analyzed so as to broaden the scope of translation studies.