A Study Of Lin Yutang's Translation--Interaction Between His Translation And Writing

Lin Yutang (1895-1976), a famous scholar, writer and translator, started to publish his writings in both Chinese and English on various magazines in the early 1920s and gradually formed his own writing styles of humor, Hsingling and leisure. He also initiated three magazines: This Human World, The Cosmic Wind and The West Wind. During this time, he translated several kinds of books from English to Chinese and wrote many papers about his translation thoughts and opinions, the most systematic and influential one of which was "On Translation". In this article, Lin Yutang put forward "three requirements for translators" and proposed three translation criteria of "fidelity, fluency and aesthetic quality." In 1936, at the invitation of Pearl S. Buck, he wrote and published My Country and My People, which became very popular in America. Consequently, Lin Yutang moved to the United States, started his thirty-year English writing and Chinese-English translating career abroad and gave publicity to Chinese culture among the Westerners. His introduction of Chinese culture was met with great favor among Western readers, and he was nominated for the Nobel Prize of Literature because of Moment in Peking.Because of some political reasons, Lin Yutang's English books written in America were not translated and published in mainland until the early 1980s. The studies of him since then heated up as well, but the most majority of which only regarded him either as a writer or as a translator independently. In view of his increasingly important status in the history of Chinese literature, this paper, on the basis of the study on his translation, also touches upon the interactive relations between his translating and writing so as to reach a relatively comprehensive understanding of Lin Yutang. The study of Lin Yutang's translation in this paper mainly includes his translation thought and its reflection in his translation practice. The paper selects Lin Yutang's representative translation version of Fu Sheng Liu Ji and that of English translator Black as a case study, through a comparative analysis of which, the gains and losses of his "three requirements for translators" and three translation criteria—fidelity, fluency and aesthetic quality—in his translation practice are evaluated in the comparison. The forth chapter discusses the interactive relations between Lin Yutang's translating and writing, such as the inspiration of his early translations upon the writings in the aspects of the conception of characters and plots and the concept of women, and the interaction of writings upon translations in the selection of translation source texts and the establishment of his translation criteria and the sentence-for-sentence translation method.Lin Yutang's contributions in the communications between Chinese and Western cultures are evident: in the history of modern Chinese literature, he promoted the formation and development of the writing styles of modern Chinese essays; in the foreign countries, his translations and English writings opened up the themes of American Chinese literature and thus participated in the construction of American literature. The author, by the writing of this paper, hopes to help the research community to reach a new height of the understanding of Lin Yutang.