A Study Of Lin Yutang’s Famous Chinese Short Stories From The Perspective Of Memes Of Translation

This thesis studies Lin Yutang’s Famous Chinese Short Stories with Chesterman’s memes of translation serving as the theoretical framework. To be clear, the four translation meme patterns are expectancy-clarity, relation-truth, communication-understanding and accountability-trust. Memes of translation offered a descriptive and integrated view to analyze the translation phenomena. Through the analysis, it has been found that Chesterman’s memes of translation has its uniqueness in analyzing the quality of the literary translation especially in four effects i.e. clarity, truth, understanding and trust.Lin Yutang, a literature hero of his generation, collected twenty famous classical Chinese short stories and translated them into humorous and beautiful English, which achieved a wide popularity among western readers. Lin Yutang had his own idea of translation like"faithfulness", "fluency" and "beauty" as well as translators’responsibility, which might be a reason why his translation is in good agreement with Chesterman’s memes of translation.Chesterman’s memes of translation provides a brand new perspective to appreciate Lin’s Famous Chinese Short Stories. The analysis of Lin’s Famous Chinese Short Stories, based on this theory, aims to prove its applicability to literary translation studies. Moreover, it also helps improve readers’understanding and appreciation of Lin’s translation phenomena and style. In addition to the qualitative analysis, the paper uses simple statistics to compare and contrast the source text and the target text based on Chesterman’s translation memes in four meme patterns i.e. expectancy-clarity, relation-truth, communication-understanding and accountability-trust. The research findings are:(1) Readers’expectations have been taken into full account in the selection and categorization of Lin’s twenty stories to make the target language clear and to help promote the truth, trust and understanding values;(2) Lin’s translation conforms to the relation norm reflecting the truth value between the source text and the target text in two aspects. The first one is the appropriate corresponding between the two in the key elements of short stories like genre, theme, plot and main characters, as well as in the word level, sentence level and paragraph level; another aspect is that the retelling like the translation addition (Aâ†'A+A’), subtraction (Aâ†'A-) and mutation (Aâ†'B) out of translator’s accountability also embody the truth value since all the retelling help make the target text communicative, understandable and trustworthy.(3) Lin’s Famous Chinese Short Stories is in consistency with his translation idea and it also conforms to Chesterman’s memes of translation, which help prove that memes of translation, as a translation theory, is valuable to guide the translation practice and to produce better translation.This thesis firstly introduces the research background, the significance and the structure. Based on former studies on Lin Yutang, his Famous Chinese Short Stories and Chesterman’s memes of translation, it systematically cites Chesterman’s theoretical pattern to analyze and discuss the examples in the text. Finally the conclusion and limitation are given.