Lin Yutang's Self-translation Of Between Tears And Laughter Into Tixiaojiefei

Self-translation is said to be an ideal model. Compared with the common translators, a self-translator can understand the meanings of the original text more comprehensively and profoundly. For, after all, the text he translates is written by himself, and thus he knows exactly what he wants to express in the original. But a good understanding of the original is just a good beginning of translating, and self-translators still have to tackle the conflicts between Eastern and Western cultures and the different thinking ways in the process of translation the common translators are often faced with. Therefore, self-translation as a special phenomenon complies with the general principle of translation study. However, so far the studies on self-translation practice and theory are very limited in Chinese translation circle.Aesthetics of reception as a literary theory focuses on the active role of reader and offers literary translation studies some enlightenment. In the process of forming a target text, the translator, first as a reader to the original text, follows the response-inviting structure of the text to identify indeterminacies and supplement blanks, but at the same time, his imagination is restricted to the structure of the text, and therefore he can not explain the meaning of the original text at will. Besides, it is inevitable that the translator has to take into account the target reader's reception competence and expectations to make his translation extensively accepted. Practice shows that the convergence of aesthetics of reception and translation studies provides us with a new perspective.By wedging concepts of aesthetics of reception into the study of Lin Yutang's self-translation, this thesis explores Lin's self-translation practice based on a case study of his self-translated Between Tears and Laughter into Tixiaojiefei. The concept of"text's response-inviting structure"shows that, due to the advantage of understanding the original text more comprehensively and profoundly, a self-translator would explain the original more freely and vividly. The concept of"the implied reader"indicates that, though the self-translator's special advantage allows him to recompose the original freely, he is still faithful to the original to a great extent. The concept of"the reader's horizon of expectation"demonstrates that self-translation is not merely a translation, but mostly a supplement to the original, especially in such a case when Lin Yutang translates his own text into his mother language, what he cannot express thoroughly in English can be supplemented in his self-translated Chinese version to satisfy the Chinese reader's exepectation.