Comparative Study Of Lu Xun's And Li Yutang's Translation Principles

This thesis is indended to make a comparative study of Lu Xun's and Lin Yutang's translation principles. Different from the traditional translation studies, the present thesis is not intended to make an evaluative study of translation skills and techniques on textual level. On the contrary, it tries to investigate both objective socio-cultural factors-particular social and cultural position of the early 20th China and the subjective cultural attitudes of Lu Xun and Lin Yutang towards it in order to find out how these factors influenced their choices of translation strategies.In a broad sense, all human activities can be regarded as cultural activities. Translation activity forms an important part of cultural exchange between different languages. But the cultural exchange between different nations has never been on an equal stage. According to the polysystem hypothesis proposed by Even-Zohar, translators in a strong literary polysystem tend to apply domesticating strategy and thus produce translations characterized by superficial fluency, while in a weak culture foreignizing strategy prevails. He believed that'the literature culture status of a nation decides the "primary" or "secondary" position of translated literature in the polysystem and in turn it will to a large extent determine translators' translation strategies. It's necessary to point out that the polysystem hypothesis can explain the determining effect of objective socio-cultural factors on the prevalent translation strategies employed by most translators during certain period of time. But exception exists. Through the comparative study of Lu Xun and Lin Yutang's translation principles and practice, we find that whether the objective cultural position of translated literature can influence translators' translation strategies is largely due to whether the translators' subjective identification is hi accordance with the objective cultural position of a nation. Besides this, translators' different understandings of the nature of translation also exert great influence on translators' translation strategies.Through detailed investigation of Lu Xun and Lin Yutang's cultural attitudes, which mainly include the investigations of their attitudes towards Confucianism, attitudes towards Chinese classical literature and attitudes towards the literaryrevolution in modern China, the thesis tries to point out that different early life experiences and educational experiences between Lu Xun and Lin Yutang lead to their different formation of literary conception and translation principles as well, although they lived in almost the same social and cultural background. Lu Xun, who was regarded as the indomitable fighter, dared to look reality in the face. He saw the Chinese culture as "backward" and thus emphasized the social function of literature. He advocated foreignizating strategy in translation in order to import both new ideas and new ways of expressions for the reform of decaying Chinese culture and the overthrow of the Qing government. On the contrary, Lin Yutang underwent a totally opposite direction to that of Lu Xun's. From the early age, Lin Yutang began to touch the Western culture and he was somehow more familiar with the Western culture than with the Chinese culture. And he formed a unique understanding of the Chinese culture that divorced from the dominant trend of his time. Thus he chose to introduce the Chinese culture by both translating Chinese prose, essay and poetry and doing creative writing in English as well. And in order to appeal to the Western readers' expectation Lin Yutang was more willing to employ domesticating strategy in translation.From this we can see, it is the translator's subjective choice that plays the decisive role in choosing translation strategies. Although the polysystem hypothesis has taken the objective social-cultural factors into consideration, it neglects the subjective identification of translators. By taking into account the translators' cultural attitudes towards the Chinese culture and translated liter...