Analysis Of The Lin Yutang’s English Version Of Six Chapters Of A Floating Life From The Perspective Of Translation As Adaptation And Selection

"Translation as adaptation and selection" is a new perspective to interpret translation activities and translation phenomenon. And it is the foundation of eco-translatology. According to the theory, the translation is defined as "a selection activity of the translator’s adaptation to fit the translational eco-environment". Simply speaking, translation is translators’adaptation and selection. Here, eco-environment refers to the worlds of the source text, source language and target language, comprising the linguistic, communicative, cultural and social aspects of translating, as well as the author, the client, and the readers. This definition shows that all the adaptation and selection in the translating process are finished by the translator. The adaptation is the translator’s selective adaptation, and at the same time, the selection is also adaptive selection. The translator is a combination of adaptation and selection. Translator’s adaptation and selection can be put into three aspects, i.e. adaptation/selection to needs, adaptation/selection to his competence and adaptation/selection to translational eco-environment.The present thesis attempts to make a tentative study of Lin Yutang’s translating Six Chapters of a Floating Life within Hu’s theoretical framework of translation as adaptation and selection. It is to prove that Lin’s choice of the source text Fu Sheng Liu Ji and translation strategies are due to his own adaptation/selection to the above-mentioned three aspects, in which his subjectivity plays a crucial role.According to this theory, the generation process of translated text may generally be divided into two stages:"nature" selects translator and "nature" selects translated text, that is, the text-choosing stage and the reconstruction stage. At the text-choosing stage, the translator’s adaptation and selection is the western world’s desire to Chinese culture, his attitudes towards life as well as personal interest. This section talks about Lin’s adaptation and selection to external and internal needs. From the beginning of the20th century to the Second World War, most of the Chinese translation practitioners devote themselves to translate foreign literatures into Chinese and expect to modernize Chinese language and literature. In contrast, having experienced the First World War, huge industrial expansion and the Great Depression, the Western world turned to the Chinese culture to overcome the malady of modernization. However, as a Chinese, Lin paid more attention to Western world’s need and translated more from Chinese into English than the way round. To introduce the Chinese culture to the western world, he chose to translate Fu Sheng Liu Ji for the Chinese scholars’temperament, personality and view of life represented in it conformed to his own life philosophy and it could fulfill his strong internal need for self-expression, motivated by his psychological state at that time. This section also explores Lin’s adaptation and selection to his competence. According to the translation as adaptation and selection theory, in order to survive better in the translational eco-environment, the translator improves the version’s degree of holistic adaptation and selection by selecting the source texts that correspond to his own competence. The competence covers not only the translator’s bilingual and bicultural ability, but also his ability to keep the original literary style of the source text in the target text. So in this section, the literary correspondence between the source text and Lin Yutang is first talked about. Lin’s competence in the familiar style writing and advocating Hsingling literature found the correspondence between the translator and the source text, which shares the characteristics of the familiar style writing and Hsingling literature. This section gives the answer to the question why Lin chose to translate the very source text Fu Sheng Liu Ji. Then Lin’s bilingual and bicultural competence is dealt with. In the translation process, the translator adapts to various dimensions and then selects translation methods adaptively.In this section, the author chooses linguistic, cultural and communicative dimensions to analyze how Lin adapted and selected in the process of translating Fu Sheng Liu Ji. As to linguistic dimension, for the structure level, due to the great differences between classical Chinese and modern English, it’s impossible to keep the same patterns in the translation. Out of his responsibility for the target text readers, Lin did the best he could to conform to English syntactic norms. As to cultural dimension, Lin Yutang, with his great bilingual and bicultural proficiency, chose to employ both domestication and foreignization at his will. Through domestication, Lin adopted a transparent, fluent style to minimize the strangeness of the source text for TL readers. At the same time, he also used foreignization strategy now and then to satisfy the curious TL readers’expectation or distinct foreign cultural features in the version. With different functions, the two translation strategies were employed properly and made mutually complementary in Lin’s version.The last section is to conclude the thesis, in which the findings and limitation of this study. In spite of some limitations, this thesis is significance in the following two aspects. On one hand, it provides a comparatively overall picture of Lin’s translating Six Chapters of a Floating Life and brings about the answers to the questions concerned:why Lin chose to translate it; how he translated it. On the other hand, it can be used and a case study to prove the feasibility of Hu’s approach to translation as adaptation/selection.