Yang Bi And Her Classic Translation

Yang Bi , one of the famous translators in the history of Chinese literary translation. Her representative work—《名利场》has been considered one of the classical literary translation works in China since its publication by People's Literary Publishing House in 1957. Based on a thorough understanding of the original, Yang Bi re-creatively rendered William Thackery's masterpiece-Vanity Fair in the 1950s. Her language in the translation is not only fluent and original but also beautiful and meaningful. Besides, her translation reconstructs the literary style of the original to the greatest extent. It is a wonderful representative the translated literary works in China. This paper is going to explore the reasons for the popularity of Yang Bi's translation of Vanity Fair from textual and extra-textual aspects. The extra-textual is from the background of the author, (such as her family ,her pre-school education and school education, the good command of English and Chinese etc.), her serious and responsible working style, the preferential academic background during Yang Bi's time and the choice of text. Good at imitating and lively and humorous characters was coincidental with Thackery's humorous literary style. Yang Bi's well-educated family provided her good pre-school education which helped her lay solid foundation in Chinese. Her English teaching experience in Tsinghua and Zheng Dan was of great help to improve her English. All these show that the competence of a translator is the foundation and necessity for the good translation. In addition, the two sessions of National Conference of Translation also provided good academic environment for literary translation. Through analyzing the target language text, the choice of words, the use of four-character phrases and the reproduction of the original especially the reproduction of the image of the original are the main reasons for the success of Yang Bi's version.