Lin Yutang’s Self-Translation Of Between Tears And Laughter

Literary self-translation is a special translation phenomenon. Different attentions have been paid to it by scholars at home and abroad in recent years, but few are about its translation ethics. Due to its increasingly rich practice at present, it’s quite necessary to discuss the special translation ethics of self-translation.In an article entitled Proposal for a Hieronymic Oath, Andrew Chesterman, a Finnish scholar proposed four basic models to translation ethics, i.e., ethics of representation, ethics of service, ethics of communication as well as norm-based ethics. It has been regarded as the most comprehensive and systematic study on translation ethics.The Chinese version of Between Tears and Laughter is very special in that its first eleven chapters were self-translated by the author Lin Yutang, and the remaining parts were rendered by Xu Chengbin, a combination of self-translation and conventional translation. Through the comparative study of Lin’s self-translation and Xu’s conventional translation from the perspective of Chesterman’s four basic models to translation ethics, this thesis attempts to make a tentative study on special translation ethics for self-translators. Based on the analysis of chosen examples from Lin Yutang’s self-translation and from Xu Chengbin’s conventional translation of Between Tears and Laughter, this thesis draws a conclusion that literary self-translators, just like conventional translators, observe the four basic models spontaneously, but the focus is different. Conventional translators, who have to be restricted by the standard of "faithfulness" or "fidelity", will first follow the ethics of representation. Unlike their conventional counterparts, literary self-translators are to some extent freed from the so-called norm of "faithfulness". It’s no longer a problem whether they are faithful to the original text and original author or not. Furthermore, in order to meet the expectations of target readers and make their translations more readable, acceptable and popular in target language nation, literary self-translators will feel no hesitation to bring some changes or adjustments to the translations and thus are inclined to follow the norm-based ethics, especially when taking the aesthetic and poetry effects into account. That is to say, for an effective translation, conventional translators first will follow the ethics of representation, which stands for the ethical relation between translators and authors, while literary self-translators first comply with the norm-based ethics, an ethical relation between translators and their target readers.