The Translator’s Subjectivity Within The Cultural Context—a Case Study Of Two Chinese Translations Of Moment In Peking

Lin Yutang, a distinguished bilingual writer, has created many noted works in both English and Chinese. Among his various English works, Moment in Peking is undoubtedly the most popular one. On one hand, this work aims to introduce and spread the colorful Chinese traditional culture to the western world; on the other hand, it also aims to publicize the Anti-Japanese War and encourage Chinese people spiritually. Since its first publication in the United States, it has been translated into many languages. Among its Chinese versions, Zhang Zhenyu’s Jinghua Yanyun and Yu Fei’s Shunxi Jinghua are the best-received ones. However, Zhang Zhenyu and Yu Fei differ from each other greatly in such aspects as the living environment, educational background and translation experience. Therefore, it is quite understandable that their translations, though both very popular, vary greatly. After reviewing the existing researches on the two Chinese translations, the author notices that most of the researches are conducted simply from the perspective of a certain translation theory or translation strategy like Skopos theory and domestication/foreignization. Yet, few scholars have made a comparative study of the two Chinese versions of the novel from a comprehensive viewpoint.Since the “cultural turn” in the 1970 s in the translation studies of the West, more and more attention has been paid to the cultural awareness and the translator’s status, and our research horizons thus have been greatly broadened and deepened. With the acceleration of cultural turn in translation studies, the translator’s subjectivity in cultural context has become a topic that is worth of further studies.In this thesis, the author intends to study the connotations of the translator’s subjectivity in cultural context, on the basis of which, to build a network of power relations from the perspectives of the translator’s subjectivity and cultural context. The network will then be applied into the study and analysis of the two Chinese versions of Moment in Peking, so as to explore the reasons behind the differences between them. Hopefully, this thesis could deepen our understanding towards translation process and shed some light on similar literary translation in the future.