The Effects Of Lu Xun’s Translating Language On His Writing Language From The Perspective Of Language Transfer

Lu Xun is not only a great litterateur, but also a well-known translator. Duringthe entire span of his life, he translated about five million words, almost the same ashis writings’. For him, literary creation and translation are equally important; in fact,they do interact with each other.Language transfer has been a central issue in Second Language Acquisition,studying how the first language (native language) affects the acquisition of the secondeven the third language. Here, language transfer is introduced into translation studiesto explain how one’s translating language influences his/her writing language. It’swidely accepted that language transfer results from the similarities and differencesbetween the target language and the acquired language. Writing language, based onthe knowledge system of source language, is used by a translator for his/her literarycreation, while translating language is used for his/her literary translation. Translatinglanguage is affected not only by the knowledge system of source language but also bythe one of target language. Therefore, although writing language and translatinglanguage are presented with the same linguistic notations by the same person, they aredifferent since translating language is branded more or less with source language. Thepaper explores how Lu Xun’s translating language influences his writing language byfinding out their similar language features and making a contrastive analysis betweenthem.As an outstanding litterateur during the May4thmovement, Lu Xun has madehuge contribution to the reform of literature and language which is closely related tohis translation. The paper is expected to arouse more attention to Lu Xun’s doubleidentity as a translator and as a writer and to contribute to the studies on Lu Xun’stranslation.