On Translation Variation In Lin Yutang’s English Version Of Six Chapters Of A Floating Life

With the fine language, sincere feeling and touching content, Six Chapters of a Floating Life attracted the scholar Lin Yutang, who devoted himself to translating the book into English. After the revision for many times, Lin’s English version was published in1935and it was popular with British readers. The translated version has manifested his high translation skills. Many scholars at home and abroad have analyzed and studied it from different perspectives, for example, cultural differences, language style and translator’s subjectivity.In Lin’s version, there are many additions, deletions and adaptations. This can be labeled as "being unfaithful" within the framework of traditional translation theories. However, it had great social influence at that time. The traditional translation theories cannot give a proper explanation to this phenomenon, but Skopos theory proposed by German functionalist approaches offers a new perspective to study it.In the light of Skopos theory, translation is a purposeful intercultural action. The translation strategies are determined by the purpose of translation action. In the translation, the translator can choose proper translation methods to achieve translation purpose and satisfy the reader’s needs. Based on this theory, the influence made by this purpose on Lin Yutang’s decisions and strategies adopted in translation is discussed. Lin’s translation purposes of Six Chapters of a Floating Life are to convey Chinese culture to the westerners and meanwhile entertain the western readers, meeting their reading needs. Thereby in the translation, Lin adopts some variation methods, that is, translation variation. To make a comparatively thorough analysis on Lin’s translation variation, strategies in his English version, the thesis gives many examples chosen from the original and analyzes the translation variation of the translated text. By the analysis, it is shown that Lin chooses different translation strategies for different situations to fulfill his specific translation purposes. These variation methods often contain amplification, deletion, edition, narration, reduction, combination and adaptation. Lin’s practice not only meets English grammar and expression habits, but also maintains the characteristic of Chinese culture, which is the reason for the success of Lin’s English version. It is worth for researchers and lovers to have further study and discussion.