The Visibility Of A Translator-Exampled By Lin Yutang's Translation Of Fu Sheng Liu Ji

From the traditional view of translation study, the translator has been playing his role as a servant, traitor, and even an invisible man. Fortunately, there appears a new trend to explore innovative approaches to translation studies. The"cultural turn"has been advocated by Susan Bassnette and Andre Lefevere; Professor Hu Gengshen has published a monograph The Central Position of the Translator, in which he gave a detailed illustration to highlight the function and position the translator plays in translating, thus promoting the translator to be more aware of his self-discipline and self-esteem and marking out his professional identity and initiative. What is more,"the era for the death of the original author has come and it is the turn for translators"is also a new voice from Lawrence Venuti who spoke loud for American deconstructionist's translation study and called for action to make translators visible in the process of translating. With all these new studies on translators, the passive and invisible status of translators will be changed for better.Scholars at home and abroad have made new and positive study for what role the translator should play, among which the subjectivity of the translator, the central position of the translator and the creativity of the translator are the most influential. This thesis will begin with a historical view of translators'status and develop into a new subject concerning translators'visibility and it gets the enlightenment from Venuti's book The Translator's Invisibility and Lin Yutang's paper On Translation as well as the illumination of the previous three studies.This thesis tries to provide a new approach to translators'study, and it explores into a detailed comparison between Lin Yutang's English translation of Fu Sheng Liu Jj (Six Chapters of A Floating Life) with that of Shirley M. Black, an English translator. It joyfully finds out that Lin Yutang's translation can reflect his personal situation in four aspects. Personally speaking, I prefer Lin Yutang's translation because he was flexible in dealing with the relationship between him and the source text and perfectly put himself in his translation without going away from the canonic rules.From the information Lin Yutang left in his translation, this thesis analyzes why Lin Yutang did that and how he realized his visibility in his translation with support of case studies. Then it explores a new topic: the visibility of the translator, which seems too new and unsystematic for some people to accept immediately, but surely arouses attentions from insightful minds.