A Study Of The Importance Of Living In The Light Of Skopos Theory

Lin Yutang is a leading pioneer in bridging the east and the west, and his masterpiece The Importance of Living is an outstanding interpretation of Chinese Xian Shi philosophy and leisure life activities. The book has a great cultural value and obtains a huge success in cross-cultural communication. It used to cause quite a sensation among western readers. Its great achievements offer the scholars in translation field an excellent reference book and precious experience with regard to the strategies of inheriting and publicizing fine Chinese cultural heritage.The Importance of Living is featured by the blending of writing and translating. The translated content covers almost one fourth of the entire book and is an indispensable component of the book. It complements writing efficiently in constructing the theme, the content and the style. The abundance and significance of the translating in The Importance of Living makes it a valuable object to recognize the features of Lin’s translation practice in writing. However, present studies on the book are mainly concerned with its literary value but seldom touch its importance to the translation studies.The rendering in the masterpiece could not be explained by equivalence-based translation theories and demands a new angle of analysis for its specialty. It is different from a traditional translation in terms of the complexity of the source texts (including a huge number of Chinese originals belonging to various text types, such as ballad, poem, novel, drama and letter, etc), the diversity of the target texts (like selective translation, abstract translation and adaptive translation, etc), and the flexibility of translating standards. Its unconventionality goes beyond the translation criteria in equivalence-based theories, which are inadequate or unable to explain the strategies used in The Importance of Living.The distance between the theory and practice calls for a more comprehensive theory to overcome the limits of "equivalence". The skopos theory, the core of the functionalist translation theories, recognizes the restrictions of the equivalence-based ideas and gives the translation a more solid foundation of the theory of action than linguistics. The functionalists regard translation as not merely the transference between source language and target language but a complex, intentional, communicative, interpersonal, intercultural and partial text-processing action. Every action has a purpose. Translation is no exception. The skopos or the intended function of the translation dominates the translation practice, i.e., the ends justify the means. The skopos decides the selection of the source texts, the forming of the target text and the evaluating criteria, which would cause diversity in translation. The unconventionality of the translated content in The Importance of Living may be able to be justified in the framework of the skopos theory.In addition, the corpus of The Importance of Living is built and tagged according to the specialty of the rendering, with the purpose to get a direct and objective impression of the importance and features of the translated content in the book.The study of The Importance of Living from the standpoint of the skopos theory would shed some light on Lin Yutang’s translation studies, yield a few basic findings in the recognition of the characteristics of translation in writing and also is a try to explore flexible approaches in publicizing fine Chinese culture in21st century.