Lin Yutang's "Third Space"and His Translation Fu Sheng Liu Ji

Lin Yutang, 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", "leisure" and "natural disposition and intelligence". During this period of time, he also translated a lot of books and put forward his translation thoughts and opinions in a famous essay "On Translation". Lin Yutang moved to America in 1936, from then on he 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.The "third space" is a term put forward by Homi Bhabha in his representative work Location of Culture. For Bhabha the "third space" is an "interstitial space" of new forms of cultural meaning and production that blurs the limitations of existing boundaries. He presents the term to describe the construction of culture and identity within conditions of colonial antagonism and inequity. The "third space" is a form of liminal or in-between space between the coloniser and colonised. As Lin Yutang was a writer and translator deeply influenced by Western Christian culture and Chinese traditional culture, taking Lin Yutang as a case study is of great importance to do some deep research on translators'"third space" and the translation strategies they choose.The thesis is composed of five chapters, including the introduction and the conclusion. Chapterâ… is the introduction, which gives an overall briefing about Lin Yutang and a literature review of the comments and existing research on Lin Yutang and his works; Chapterâ…¡is the part of theoretical basis, which gives a detailed explanation of Homi Bhabha's hybridity and the "third space" theory, and how to use the "third space" theory to do research on Lin Yutang; The following two chapters are the core of the thesis, Chapterâ…¢illustrates the dual influence of Chinese and Western culture which was exerted on Lin Yutang, and how his "third space" was gradually constructed; In Chapterâ…£, the author of this thesis takes a special work as a case study-Lin Yutang's translation version of Shen Fu's Fu Sheng Liu Ji. In his translation version, Lin, with his great bilingual and bicultural proficiency, chose to employ a lot of translation strategies at will to minimize the strangeness of the source text for Western readers and at the same time satisfy Western readers'expectations for distinct foreign cultural features of ancient Chinese flavor. It fully shows Lin's cultural hybridity in his translation strategies; The last chapter is the conclusion which summarizes the significance of the research which has been done in this thesis.The construction of Lin Yutang's "third space" is actually pursuing balance between his Chinese and Western background and maintaining the part of national characteristics. Nowadays more and more translators have stood in the same position as Lin Yutang, thus making systematic researches of translators'"third space" will be of universal significance to the translation studies in the future.