On The Translation Activity In Lin Yutang’s The Importance Of Living

Lin Yutang, a forerunner of Chinese cultural export, has made great achievements in promoting Chinese culture to the west. His The Importance of Living is such a classic. Though written in English, it involves inevitably a lot of Chinese-English translation which aims at elaborating on life philosophy of Chinese people. The translation of Chinese traditional culture constitutes the core of the whole book.The present thesis applies Lefevere’s Manipulation theory to the research of the translation activity in The Importance of Living. Lefevere has his eyes on the existed literary translation from the perspective of comparative literature. His study is essentially a cross-cultural research, different from the traditional translation one which focuses on the linguistic transformation between languages. Lefevere holds that translation is a cultural rewriting of the original text as well as a cultural manipulation. The translators usually adjust the original texts to fit in with the dominant, or one of the ideological and poetological currents of their time. Ideology, poetics, patronages are the most influential "control factors". This thesis is an attemption to explore how ideology, poetics and patronage shaped and manipulated Lin Yutang’s translation activity in The Importance of Living.It has been found that such manipulation lied in three aspects:translation motivation, selection of the original texts, and translation methods and strategies. The suggestion made by the patrons:Pearl S. Buck and Richard J. Walsh of writing The Importance of Living implied the ideological consideration in his writing (including translation) motivation. In comparison with the mechanical and material western civilization, Lin Yutang highlighted the original texts, which advocated "leisure" and "enjoyment" and was of strong oriental flavor, in order to correspond to the ideology and poetics in the target culture. Ideologically the imbalanced status between the cultures affected the adoption of translation methods and strategies. To help western readers of the strong culture to absorb the selected texts in an accessible manner, he employed different translation strategies such as deduction, amplification, and adaptation, which adapted to the readers’ reading habits and ways of thinking and improved the readability and acceptability of the translated works. Meanwhile, the employment of translation variation strategies, such as editing, narration and condensation reduced the readers’obstacle to understanding the Chinese literary idioms and helped audience enjoy a smooth and fluent reading. What’s more, in order to preserve the exotic color of the Oriental texts, he also adopted literal translation. In short, Lin Yutang was consistently faithful to his target readers from the choice of both the source texts and translation methods.The thesis finally points out that the great popularity which The Importance of Living enjoyed in the western society was significantly due to the fact it catered to the target readers ideologically and poetologically, which was shown from the selection of the source texts and translation tactics. Such popularity helped publicize Chinese culture abroad. However the cultural manipulation also resulted in certain degree of cultural mispresentation. The thesis arrives at its conclusion that ideology, poetics and patronage exerted profound influence on Lin Yutang’s translation activity. It illustrates the applicability of Lefevere’s Manipulation theory to the actual literary translation activity.