Foreign Language Creation And Rootless Back Translation

Moment in Peking was created in English by Lin Yutang during his stay in Pairs from 1938 to 1939. This novel has three Chinese translated versions up to now. The previous studies on the translation of this novel were abundant, but most of them put their emphases on the comparison of the different Chinese versions and they classify the translation of Moment in Peking either into common translation or fuyi. The author of this paper argues that the translation of Moment in Peking is a special kind of translation, that is, rootless translation.In 2009, Professor Wang Hongyin put forward two crucial terms at the same time: Foreign language creation and rootless back translation. The appearance of rootless back translation did not just named a distinctive kind of translation theoretically but also clarified and unified different opinions and views on the translation of Moment in Peking in certain degree. While rootless back translation was based on foreign language creation, this special writing, or we can say rootless back translation only exists when a work was created in foreign language. In other words, rootless back translation is dependent on foreign language creation and these two concepts are inseparable and coexist in translation studies. Based on foreign language creation and rootless back translation, two newly proposed concepts, the author of this paper tries to analyze the translation trace in foreign language creation process and the rootless back translation methods in Moment in Peking. The research objects of this paper are Lin Yutang’s original English version and Zhang Zhenyu’s translated Chinese version of Moment in Peking. To find the translation trace in foreign language creation and rootless translation methods in Moment in Peking, the author also collects some examples to make the research objective and scientific. Because most of the collected examples are culture-loaded words and expressions, the author adopts Nida’s five classification of culture and divides them into five types regularly both in chapter three and four.After discussing and analyzing the related theory and examples, the author of this paper finds that Lin’s foreign language creation work has potential translation trace and he mainly adopted foreignization and supplemented by domestication. Besides, the author also finds English has a high degree of expressiveness force to Chinese culture. In Zhang’s rootless back translation of Moment in Peking, the author finds that he omitted some unnecessary explanations and introductions given by Lin. Besides omission, Zhang also added some other information in his rootless back translation, like the titles of the poem, the names of the historical figures, etc.