On Lin Shu's Cultural Mistranslation And His Unconscious Contributions To The Transformation Of Modern Chinese Literature

"Faithfulness" or "equivalence" has ever been hold as the only or even supreme criterion. But with the development of translation studies, literary translation is no longer limited to the traditional equivalence theory, but expands to study of factors beyond the text. Thus, one of the most important characteristics of literary translation, cultural mistranslation, gains unprecedented attention and more reasonable interpretation rather than invariable negation.Lin Shu is a controversial translator in late Qing. Traditional translation theorists don't regard his translation works as "translation", because his translated works is not faithful to the original both in structure and content. However, his "unfaithful" translated works were greatly welcomed by people and had great influences on the society at that time. Therefore, Lin Shu's mistranslation, especially his cultural mistranslation, distinguished from the pure technical errors, deserves our study and it is the very object of study in this paper.Cultural classification by anthropologists supplies the theory framework for the classification of Lin Shu's cultural mistranslation. This paper makes efforts to analyze with full and accurate examples how ideology, poetics, value and religion affect Lin Shu and induce his cultural mistranslation. Through this colorful case study, it's found that many factors beyond the text have great influences on the translator's translation methods, such as social-cultural background of late Qing, the expectation of the readers, Lin Shu's translation purposes and writing habits etc. Lin Shu's cultural mistranslation doesn't bury his works. On the contrary, it makes great contributions to the transformation of Chinese modern literature. Owing to the limitation of the times and Lin Shu himself, his contributions are unconscious.