A Study On Lin Yutang's Version Of Fu Sheng Liu Ji From The Perspective Of Intertextuality

The theory of intertextuality is in fact a kind of text theory rooted in structuralism and post-structuralism in the West. In 1960s, Julia Kristeva, a French scholar, is the first person to put forward the concept of intertextuality. She indicates that any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations and any text is the absorption and transformation of others. In other words, each text is mirrored by other texts and all texts are co-referenced and interweaved, thus an infinite net is formed. In fact, before Kristeva, the basic idea of intertextuality had appeared in the works on poetics of M.M.Bakhtin of Russia, whose dialogism had contained the basic ideas of intertextuality. After Kristeva, many scholars have also made contributions to the theory of intertextuality from different perspectives.Translation is actually a cross-time-and-space communication activity. Translating process is composed of reading, interpreting and restructuring in the target language. The translator, as the subject of this activity, plays three different roles, the reader, the interpreter and the rewriter of the translated text. Thus, from the theory of intertextuality, the main intertext of the translated text is the source text. Through analyzing the intertextual information contained in the source text, finding out and understanding the intertextual references and signals, adopting suitable translation techniques, the translator is able to make the readers appreciate the translated text just as native readers understand the original.This dissertation takes Fu Sheng Liu Ji by Shen Fu, an essayist in Qing dynasty, as a sample, which has been translated into English as Six Chapters of a Floating Life by Lin Yutang, a great man of letters, famous translator and renowned scholar of Chinese national culture, who with profound bilingual ability adopts different translation techniques, such as literal translation, free translation, transliteration and interpreting, etc. Even though there is a little inappropriateness in the translation, the...