A Comparative Study Between Self-translation And Conventional Translation Of Between Tears And Laughter From Gender Translation Theory Perspective

Being one of the most influential and controversial works by Lin Yutang,Between Tears and Laughter,the product of the WWⅡ that was published in New York in 1943,immediately generated an enormous response in the West for its sharp criticism about the international environment and poignant description of the unfair treatment China received during the wartime.In order to broadcast his political belief and awaken his innocent compatriots living in dimness,Lin Yutang self-translated the first eleven chapters of the original and personally requested Xu Chengbin,an editor of the Western Literature and one of the most famous translators of the day,to complete the rest.In 1945,Song Biyun,one of the most productive female translator s in Taiwan,also translated the source text into Chinese.However,owing to the political sensitiveness of the work content and Lin Yutang’s awkward position in the Chinese literature,bothLin Yutang’s self-translation and Song Biyun’s conventional translation were sooner mired into controversy and the relevant studies on them also remained in a standstill for the next decades.Although this academic dilemma has been gradually relieved after the reappraisal of Lin Yutang in the later 1970 s,the relevant studies made on the translation of Between Tears and Laughter are still fewer thanexpected.Among these limited studies,most of them focused on Lin Yutang’s self-translation and his aesthetics translation concepts and few paidany attention to the gender issues or politically-related factors in the two Chinese versions,or compare Lin Yutang’s self-translation with Song Biyun’s conventional translation in parallel from the perspective of gender translation theory.Therefore,there is much to be explored in this field.Based on the gender translation theory as well as both English and Chinese texts,this thesis,with the help of corpus software,attempts to compare Lin Yutang’s self-translation and Song Biyun’s conventional translation of Between Tears and Laughter in terms of the three most typical gender translation strategies--supplementing,prefacing and footnoting as well as highjacking.This thesis holds that translation,which is,in nature,a product of the “marriage” between the masculine authorship(or partnership)and feminine translator’s identity,is closely tied to the translators’ literacy,biological genders,translation motivations,political stance as well as specific historical and social environments.Despite the shared androgynous identity and “feminist aggressiveness”,Lin Yutang’s self-translation appears to be more concise,unrestrained as well as motivation-driven and emotionally-enhanced both in diction and layout of the text whereasSong Biyun’s conventional translation,under the great influence of the particular politics and social reality of the day,seems to be more foreignized and even faithfully meticulous in language as well as more motivation-driven in the content selection and the context de-politicization.Compared with the self-tranlator’s freewheelingperfectionism,the conventional translator’s initiative is inevitably fettered by the surrounding political reality and the translation she made is,in nature,a functionally-adequate work designed to fulfill certain “writing project” only.