Translation Strategies From The Perspective Of Information Theory: Lin’s Translaion Of Fu Sheng Liuji As A Case In Point

With the entry to the global era, the cultural communication among countries is increasingly gettingfrequent. Chinese culture should be actively translated and disseminated to the world when the foreignculture is introduced into China. Therefore, it is significant to strengthen the propagation of Chinese culturein the era.Lin Yutang’s translation of Fu Sheng Liu JI is a successful example in the translation of Chineseliterary works. In this thesis, with the theoretical basis of information theory, the author analyzes LinYutang’s translation strategies, and look forward to give some inspirations for the translators to translateChinese literary works.This thesis consists of four chapters: chapter one introduces the research background, motivation,objects, questions, methodology and thesis structure; chapter two is literature review, which reviews theresearches on Lin Yutang’s translation of FU Sheng Liu Ji and information theory. In addition this chapterintroduces the theory basis of information theory and its application on translation study; chapter three firstintroduces the original work, its author, Shen Fu and its translator, Lin Yutang, then interprets thetranslation strategies adopted by Lin from the perspective of information theory; chapter four gives aconclusion, some limitations and suggestions for further study.The main findings and conclusions of the thesis are: first, information theory gives a new way tointerpret the selection of translation strategy of literary translation. Information theory studies the sending,processing and transmission of information. The noise from outside and inside of the communicationsystem is avoided by adjusting redundancy properly. Then the original information could be receivedcorrectly. Translation is a complex activity of information transmission. In the process of translation, theauthor must choose proper translation strategies to overcome the noise to match the reading capacity of thetarget readers, thus the original information could be conveyed correctly.Second, based on information theory, Lin Yutang adopts literal translation in order to remain theredundancy information; his main purpose on ellipsis is to reduce the redundancy information;decompression is the addition of redundancy information, which can be used to explain Lin Yutang’s strategy of addition; dispersion of information refers to the deviation and loss of information, which can beused to explain Lin Yutang’s strategies of transference and explanation.Lin’s translation of Fu Sheng Liu Ji gives us the inspiration that translators should adopt flexibletranslation strategies to adjust the redundancy information properly. Only in this way can we achieve theideal effect of communication.