| “Step into both eastern and western culture,comment on all the essays in the universe”,Lin Yutang has been listed as one of the “20th Century Wisdom Figures”by the American academic community,and has created many translation and literary classics based on his English proficiency.Six Chapters of a Floating Life is his first English translation work and has received widespread attention.This essay is also known as “the best manifestation of Chinese culture’s spirit”.This thesis uses Andre Lefevere’s rewriting theory as the theoretical framework to analyze Lin Yutang’s translation of Six Chapters of a Floating Life and explore the reality of “translation is rewriting”.It focuses on the cultural elements in translation process and devotes to provide a new perspective for promoting Chinese culture worldwide.Lin’s translation of Six Chapters of a Floating Life is produced by the requirements of patronage and ideology,and is a product of rewriting according to its own poetic pursuit within the parameters of the patronage and ideology.It reflects that translation is a cross-lingual and cross-cultural communication activity.The previous studies have paid more attention to the comparison of different translation versions.The explanations of the manipulating factors in existing researches are not specific enough,and they are not closely related to cross-cultural communication.Therefore,from the perspective of the ideology,poetics,and patronage of the rewriting theory,this thesis selects the translation cases in Lin’s translation for qualitative analysis and solves the following problems:(1)From the perspective of the three control factors of rewriting theory(ideology,poetics,and patrons),how Lin Yutang’s version of “Six Chapters of a Floating Life” was manipulated?(2)And from the perspective of rewriting theory,what kinds of rewriting strategies did Lin Yutang adopt to achieve the best translation effect and promoted the circulation of the translation?(3)What isthe enlightenment and guidance we can learn from Lin Yutang’s rewriting for the translation of Chinese literature today?This thesis first introduces the research background,research questions,research significance,and structure of the thesis.Based on the previous researches on rewriting theory,Lin Yutang and his translation,the author of this thesis analyzes Lin’s version of Six Chapters of a Floating Life from the perspective of rewriting theory and concludes that:(1)Lin Yutang’s rewriting under the manipulation of social ideology mainly involves the cultural aspects,and combines foreignization and domestication as his translation strategy;(2)Lin Yutang uses addition,omission and annotation in the rewriting to highlight his individual ideology and this reflects translator’s subjectivity;(3)The role of patronage runs through the process of translation production,publication and circulation.Because of the time gap and lack of enough record,there are no direct materials about the patronage which may play a role in the choices of words and sentences in the rewriting process thus this research focuses on the ideological and poetic perspectives.This deficiency may be overcome in the future study.For the future practice of Chinese literature translation,this thesis makes the following suggestions: exerting our subjective initiative to the largest degree to "send out" Chinese literary canons;the focus of the translated text can have a transition from margin to center to avoid readers’ rejection of strong ideologically attached text;under the background of this new age,our government and translators should learn to use diverse and three-dimensional mediums. |
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