Lin Shu's Translation In View Of The Approach To Translation As Adaptation And Selection

In the elapse of the last century, Lin Shu, as a celebrated translator in the late Qing Dynasty, and his translation of foreign novels have been an eternal controversial topic in the academic field. As a translator who knew nothing about foreign languages, he translated more than 180 foreign works in his own way. Although his translations always aroused charges of being unfaithful to the original texts, they were so popular for the readers of his time that Kang Youwei once said, Yan Fu and Lin Shu are geniuses of translator in China.Due to the limitation of times and the development of translation theory, the evaluation of Lin Shu's translation is full of characteristics of that time. It can be said that his translation went through three major phases. In the first phase, owing to his excellent manipulation of Chinese, his translations were praised highly by the readers for the import of new ideas, literary concepts and techniques from the West. However, in the second phase, as the traditional translation studies are preoccupied with the evaluation that his translations violated the universal rules of translation:"faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance", his translation was regarded as poor one. In the last phase, his translation has attracted increasing attention of translation scholars and the perspectives on Lin Shu's translation have become more and more diversified as a result of the cultural turn in translation study.Under such a complexity of translation studies, Hu Gengshen introduces Darwin's"adaption and selection"in evolutionism into translation studies and proposes a new translation theory:"An Approach to Translation as Adaptation and Selection". Hu regards translation as a translator's adaptation and selection activities in a translational eco-environment'. Such an eco-environment includes the worlds of the source text and the source/target languages, the linguistic, communicative, cultural and social aspects of translating, as well as the author, the client, and the readers. Within a theoretical framework of translation as adaption and selection, the process of translation is a production of the target texts by means of the translator's adaption to the eco-environment and the translator's selection.Based on the translation theory of An Approach to Translation as Adaptation and Selection, this thesis takes Lin Shu's translation of"Uncle Tom's Cabin"for example to give a reasonable explanation to the reason why Lin Shu's translation can exert such a tremendous influence under the situation of violating the traditional translation studies.