A Study Of Lin Yutang's Translating Six Chapters Of A Floating Life--From Perspective Of Translator's Subjectivity

As a famous writer and translator, Lin Yutang has made great contribution to the understanding between China and the West. This thesis is intended to make a study on Lin Yutang's favorite translated text Six Chapters of a Floating Life from the perspective of translator's subjectivity theory. Meanwhile the author attempts to investigate the role of the translator's subjectivity in the process of translation by analyzing the personal subjective factors—particularly Lin's personality, life attitude, cultural and aesthetic orientation, literary taste, translation intention, translation principles so as to find out how these factors influence his choice of source text, translation approach, strategies and specific methods.Through a detailed analysis of Lin Yutang's subjective factors in his translation activity, the author tries to explore Lin's subjectivity manifested in his translation process. The unique bilingual and bicultural background has endowed Lin with great competence as a translator, who, based on rich translation experience, puts forward his unique and insightful translation theory. This theory, with"faithfulness","smoothness',and"beauty"as translation criteria and with"lifelike"as its core, reflects Lin's view of translation as art and production, and actually manifests his acute and profound consciousness of translator's creativity, one chief characteristic of translator's subjectivity. Lin's selection of Six Chapters of a Floating Life as the source text is based on his deep affection for the text as well as his cultural purpose of introducing the essence of Chinese culture to the west, and this translation intention conditions his recourse to faithful and complete translation approach and his preference for foreignizing strategies with domestication as a complement to it. It should also be noted that during the translation process, Lin consistently applies his translation theory to translation practice with the goal of achieving"life-likeness", which constitutes another obvious manifestation of his subjectivity.