A Study On Lin Yutang’s Translation Of Six Chapters Of A Floating Life From The Perspective Of Intertextuality

As a text theory arising from structuralism and post-structuralism, intertextuality,with a history of no more than forty years, becomes one of the most frequently usedterms among Contemporary Literary Theories and Cultural Studies. In early1990s,intertextuality was introduced into translation study and makes possible to approachtranslation from a new perspective, meanwhile, a brand new field of study is created.Intertextuality is often used to indicate the intertextual relationship between twotexts or more texts. The contemporary French literary theorist Kristeva (Kristeva,1969,p.145) remarks that any text is constructed by boutique of citation, and any text is acombination of absorption and adaptation of another text. Here another text is what weoften call intertextual text, it can refer to either the predecessor’s or future generation’sliterary works diachronically, and also social historical text synchronically.Scholars advocating this theory believe that language is viewed as the basis ofexistence, so the world appears as a limitless text. Translation belongs to a kind ofcode switching activity which starts on level of language, text, culture and thinkingpatterns. Translation itself is intertextual in nature, and source text and target text areintertextual. The combination of intertextuality and translation is a new research area.The research concerning translation is more challenging a job due to the vast gapbetween different cultures and languages, so overcoming these differences is theproblem translators have to confront. The thesis adopts the English version of SixChapters of a Floating Life rendered by Lin Yutang as the research subject ofintertextuality.During the process of translating, the fact that the high intertextuality of languageand culture will bring trouble to the understanding of translation, but Lin Yutangadopts varied strategies to cope with these problems, tries his uttermost to convey orreconstruct the intertextuality of the source text, and brings authentic feelings to targetreaders to further strengthen the higher level exchanges between different cultures.Considering this, the writer endeavors to introduce intertextuality into translation,through analyzing the translation of intertextual markers of the English version Six Chapters of a Floating Life to enhance the communications and understandings interms of different cultures.