Study On Lin Yutang’s English Version Of Passion From The Perspective Of Rewriting Theory

Passion is included in Famous Chinese Short Stories.It tells a tragedy story about a poor scholar Yuan abandons a declining noble woman named Inging.This work has a significance influence.The famous XI Xiangji(《西厢记》the drama of the Yuan Dynasty)is rewritten based on this story.The English version of this story was produced by a well-known writer and translator Lin Yutang, who is an outstanding translator having a thorough knowledge of both Chinese and Western Literature. So far, he has completed and translated more than 30 works, and he promotes the cultural exchanges between China and the West actively. In CNKI, there are 400 papers related to the researches on Lin Yutang’ translation, among them there are 10 typical articles. They discuss on Lin Yutang’ translation theory and practice from different perspectives, such as: Cross Cultural Communication, Translation View, Culture View, Intertextuality, Media-Translatology, Cultural Adaptation Theory of Choice, Translation Variation Theory, Functional Translation Skopos Theory, Ideology, Patronage and Poetics Theory of Three factors, Polysystem Theory and so on. Many of views from the research papers are worth learning. This paper concentrates on analyzing Lin Yutang’s translation works: Passion with the application of rewriting theory proposed by Andre Lefevere.The Rewriting theory is proposed by Andre Lefevere. He says that translation do not happen in vacuum. Any form of translation is a rewriting; Translation is the manipulation to the original text. It is the result of the mutual effect among the three factors named ideology and poetics and patronage.The author attempts to analyze Lin Yutang’s translation of Passion as a case study by using Lefevere’s rewriting theory. This thesis discusses Lin Yutang’s rewriting of Passion, from the rewriting theory’s three dominant factors ideology, poetics and patronage perspectives. The study finds that in the English-speaking countries, translation of Chinese literature will eventually face reader groups with different cultural backgrounds. How can you make more target readers accept the translation works? This is controlled by the target reader’s poetics and ideology. Meanwhile, Patrons of the published works are often reflecting the culture of the mainstream poetics and ideology. Therefore, it is appropriate to employ rewriting theory to analyze Passion. But at the same time, the research also points out that rewriting should be performed on the basis of respecting for the original text, it cannot enlarge the influence of poetics, ideology and patronage.The author hopes that through the translation of Chinese literature with the aid of rewriting theory, it can promote the common progress of theory and practice of translation. At the same time, more translators can draw lessons from this theory in order to spread more excellent Chinese literary works to the world.