An Evaluation Of Lin Yutang's Six Chapters Of A Floating Life

Since Lin Yutang's Six Chapters of a Floating Life was republished in mainland China in 1999, it has aroused much attention in the academic circles and there have appeared a lot of research papers concerning the various aspects of its translation. Some on appreciation, some on the translation of the culture-specific words, and some conducted a contrastive study of it with two other translated versions. The author of this thesis, attracted to both the source text Fu Sheng Liu Ji and the translator Lin Yutang, master of the English language and culture, would like to conduct a detailed analysis and then make a comprehensive, subjective, and reliable evaluation of it.Largely referring to the procedures proposed by the distinguished English translation theorist Peter Newmark in his A Textbook of Translation on how to do translation criticism, the author briefly analyzes the style and language features of the source text Fu Sheng Liu Ji, and studies Lin Yutang's intention of translation and the strategies and methods he has employed. Before coming to the central task of analyzing and evaluating Six Chapters of a Floating Life, however, some questions remain unsolved, say, the principle and criteria of this translation criticism. As to the principle, the author mainly draws on the five principles proposed by Wang Hongyin in his On the Criticism of Literary Translation, i.e. objectivity, wholeness, accuracy, economy and consistency. Meanwhile she points out that such a research can refer to these principles, but cannot follow it in a strict sense, due to the fact that literary translation criticism is an artistic activity on some level. With regard to the criteria of translation criticism, the author ponders upon several influential translation theories only to find that they are more or less inappropriate. Finally, the author finds inspiration in functionalist approaches to translation and comes to propose her own, i.e., evaluate a translation through examining and comparing the translated text and the translator's translation intention and the goal s/he wishes to achieve. If s/he can fulfill this intention and achieve his/her goal, then it's a good and qualified translation. If not, then it's the critic's duty to check out in which respect has the translator fallen short. Of course, in actual practice, the criteria have to be made clearer and more detailed in light of the translator's specific translation intention and goal. Then with the specific criteria for this evaluation well-stipulated, the author conducts a detailed analysis of Six Chapters of a Floating Life, through a close comparison between it and Fu Sheng Liu Ji in terms of content, style, and culture, and examines Lin Yutang's choice of words and expressions, the sentence and paragraph structure, the translation of figures of speech, four-character expressions, verse, culture-specific words and concepts, allusions, persons'names, time, unit of measure, and currency. Also she points out some of the creative translation and mistranslation and offers her suggestions. In the concluding part, the author gives a comprehensive evaluation of Six Chapters of a Floating Life by using the aforesaid criteria and states the implication for translation criticism.The conclusions the author has arrived at are, (1) from the translator's perspective, Six Chapters of a Floating Life can be regarded as a piece of good translation, since it has well realized the translator's translation intention and goal by presenting a truthful and accurate work before the target language readers; (2) from the critic's point of view, there still are some problems concerning Lin's translation, say, some mistranslations, the inappropriate employment of translation strategies, and the lack of necessary footnotes and explanations for some cultural elements; (3) the criteria for translation criticism proposed by the author, as it has proved, is applicable not only to this task, but to other translation criticism activities as well.