A Study On Lin Yutang’s Self-translation From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Under the influence of the cultural turn in the1970s, self-translation has graduallydrawn the attention of scholars and has been warmly discussed in academic field.Although the special translation phenomenon—self-translation might be dated back tothousands of years ago, it was not until the l960s that people began taking notice ofself-translation and self-translated works. While in China, it was after2000thatincreasing numbers of scholars attached their attentions to self-translation and eminentself-translators, like Eileen Chang, Lin Yutang and Xiao Qian.Lin Yutang was a world-famous litterateur, philosopher, linguist and humorist. Asa bilingual and bicultural writer and also an eminent self-translator, he made greatcontributions to cultural exchange between China and western countries.This thesis makes a tentative study on Lin Yutang and his essay collections TheLittle Critic: The Bilingual Essays of Lin Yutang from the perspective of relevancetheory. Through the analysis of the examples selected from The Little Critic: TheBilingual Essays of Lin Yutang, this thesis realizes the distinctive features ofself-translation and bicultural identity of self-translators determine that self-translatorsalways adopt flexible target-reader-oriented translation strategies and manage to dealwith translation problems, especially cultural gaps between source text and target textmore skillfully and reasonably. At last, the thesis draws three conclusions, which mayhave some influence on translation study more or less: first of all, culture and someother extra factors play a vital role in self-translation. Second, self-translators hold moresubjectivity towards the original text and flexible translation strategies, like “addition”,“annotation”,“deletion”,“conversion”,“replacement” are frequently adopted in theirself-translation, which is reasonable and tenable. Third,“faithfulness” needs to beunderstood in a different way.