On The Hybridity In Lin Shu's Translation

Lin Shu's translation has exerted a profound influence on the history of Chinese translation and even that of China's modernization. His translation has long been a hot subject in the field of translation studies. As a translator who didn't know any foreign languages, Lin Shu co-translated with his interpreters a large quantity of foreign literary works, the quality of which was often questioned, though. What's more, in particular historical time, Lin Shu as a patriotic liberati and expert in ancient Chinese prose used classical Chinese to translate those foreign novels, making omission or amplification to the original works, and even domesticating the original cultural contents with traditional Chinese ones. His bold and unrestrained style of translation has widely been discussed by literary critics and translation scholars, who hold different opinions towards his translation, criticizing or praising it from different perspectives, and therefore related academic achievements have been made along in profusion. In spite of this, researchers' enthusiasm on this frequently mentioned subject has never ceased, and the author of this thesis attempts to make a research from a comparatively new angle. It avoids such traditional translation norms as "fidelity" or "equivalence" and gets rid of such dichotomy as "domestication" and "foreignization", "literal translation" and "liberal translation". The notion of hybridity is brought in and Skopostheorie is adopted to re-examine Lin Shu's translation.The present thesis begins with the introduction to the research background, the significance and the structure of the thesis. For the past decades, people's understanding towards translation studies has gone deeper from fragmental instinct to systematic research. Most of the traditional translation theories center on the source text and attach great importance to the fidelity of the target text to the original one. With the cultural turn in the translation studies, social factors, ideology, politics and so on are taken into account and translation research shows strong cross-cultural and interdisciplinary tendency. Multiple theories, including polysystem theory, Skopostheorie, post-colonialism, deconstruction theory are introduced and used in the translation studies, which has largely extended the field of translation and deepened the understanding of various translation phenomena. This favourable theoretical environment provides us with good possibility to re-examine Lin Shu's translation.Lin Shu's translation is a purposeful activity, and hence in the next part, the Skopos of his translation is studied from the aspects of the target situation, the client, the target receivers and the translator. As a patriotic literati and translator at a time when China was in deep crisis, Lin Shu wished to awaken the public to make contribution to the salvation and rejuvenation of the nation by learning from the foreign countries through translation. His intention was kept in line with the then dominant ideology and his translational activity was thus sponsored by the Commercial Press. The publication of his translated novels produced both good economic and social benefits.The Skopos of Lin Shu's translation determined his adoption of hybridization as the main strategy of translation, which leads to hybrid translations. This is discussed in detail in the main body of the present paper. Lin's translated texts are hybrid on linguistic, poetic and cultural levels. He used classical Chinese to render foreign novels, made adaptation here and there, and also omitted many parts of the original that were unfamiliar to the then Chinese readers. However, he also made retainment of the original works, including transliterating some foreign words, following the original way of writing and keeping the foreign culture. These two kinds of seemingly controversial actions endowed his translations with both Chinese and foreign flavor which is an obvious hybridity. The hybrid texts have exerted great influence on the Chinese society at that time, which could be regarded as the functional fulfillment of his Skopos.The last chapter of this thesis draws the conclusion of the whole paper. It is proposed that Lin Shu's translation is a hybrid, which can be justified in terms of the Skopos of his translation. On the other hand, the Skopos or the function of Lin's translation has also been fulfilled in the target situation through his strategy of hybridization.