A Descriptive Study On "Lin Shu's Fiction Translation" And His 'Mistranslations'

Lin Shu is one of the greatest translators in China's modern history and a unique translator in Chinese translation history. Ignorant of any foreign languages, he translated more than 180 works of 98 authors from 11 countries by writing down the dictation of his collaborators. His translations were named as"Lin Yi Xiao Shuo"(Lin Shu's fiction translation) and some of them had exerted great influence to many of his contemporaries. Although his translations were highly spoken of by some modern writers and were widely read by readers from various backgrounds, in a period that translation was judged excessively by the source text, Lin had received much criticism for his translation. Traditional translation studies viewed source text as the absolute standard to evaluate a translation and attached great importance to the equivalence and faithfulness of the translation text to the source text. In that case, fictions translated by Lin Shu were often blamed by critics as"full of mistranslations"or"unfaithful to the original"for his frequent and numerous additions, deletions and adaptations.However, Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) School considers translation as a subsystem in a polysystem, a manipulation or rewriting carried out by the translator under the constraint of norms. Every manipulation or rewriting is a decision made by the translator and every precedent decision will influence the following decision. Hence, to them, translation is a constant decision-making process of the translator. Translation is not unique; therefore, there is no'ideal'or'true'translation. Based on such an understanding, scholars from Descriptive Translation Studies School contend that the purpose of translation study is not to judge the accuracy of a translation or decide whether it conforms with our expectation but to analyze why the translator made such decisions and what factors have contributed to such decisions after accepting the translation of a translator as translation.The author of this paper applied theories from DTS School such as the polysystem theory of Itamar Even-Zohar, the norm theory of Gideon Toury, Andrew Chesterman and Theo Hermans and the manipulation or rewriting theory of Andre Lefevere to study Lin Shu's translation and mistranslations. Based on the examination of Lin Shu's translation, the statements and comments made by translation theorists and translation critics as well as Lin Shu's own comments in a number of prefaces, expressions and postscripts, the author of this paper explored the various factors that lead to the occurrence of"Lin Shu's Fiction Translation"and'mistranslations'and came to such a conclusion that most'mistranslations'in Lin Shu's fiction translation should not be considered as'mistranslations'but the intentional manipulation or rewriting of the original text.