Lin Yutang's Success In Translating Six Chapters Of A Floating Life Into English-From The Perspective Of Acceptability In Text Linguistics

In translating Chinese classics into English, how to produce an acceptable target text is crucial to the introduction of Chinese culture abroad. Among the translated classics, Lin Yutang's translation of Six Chapters of a Floating Life enjoys great popularity in the West and is regarded as an example of successful translation. Studies on this version have been carried out in different fields, but the fact that translation should be accepted as a "text" has not received sufficient attention. Based on the review, this thesis aims to analyze Lin's translation from the perspective of acceptability in text linguistics and to find out how he achieved success in this version.A text is defined as a communicative occurrence in text linguistics and a translation should first be a text with communicative value. As a process of communicating, translating starts with intentionality of the producer and ends with acceptability of the receiver. In other words, the final purpose of translating is to make the target text accepted by the TT readers. Therefore, a successful translation has to achieve the acceptability at the textual level to complete the communication process.In addition, to be communicative, a text should fulfill the seven standards of textuality, namely, intentionality, cohesion, coherence, informativity, situationality, intertextuality and acceptability, among which acceptability is reader-oriented and also the final purpose for text production. Consequently, it occupies a commanding position and is reflected in the aspects of the other six standards. In this paper, acceptability at the textual level is defined as "target readers' attitudes that the translation is acceptable in the aspects of intentionality, cohesion, coherence, informativity, situationality and intertextuality"; i.e., to be accepted, the translation should be cohesive and coherent, understandable and interesting, relevant to the situation and in conformity with target language conventions, appropriate in diction to convey the ST intention and to reproduce the original style.The author investigates the acceptability of Lin's version in terms of cohesion, coherence, intentionality, situationality, informativity and intertextuality through abundant examples, and summarizes that Lin considered "text" and "textuality" during translation and managed to achieve the acceptability in the above six aspects with different techniques: in terms of intentionality, he conveyed the ST author's intention by selecting proper words and shifting the perspective; in terms of cohesion, he maintained, added and adjusted the cohesive devices based on the similarities and differences between Chinese and English; in terms of coherence, he made his translation acceptable by revealing the logical ties, adding connectives or complementing information and reorganizing the thematic structure; in terms of informativity, he downgraded or upgraded the level by adjusting the amount of information or changing syntactic structure; in terms of situationality, he selected appropriate words to fit in with various situations; in terms of intertextuality, he reproduced the style of the source text through diction, and resorted to idioms, allusions and idiomatic expressions as well as the strategy of parody to make the target text better accepted. This study will shed some light on C-E translation in the future.