On Hybridity Of Cultural Translation In Moment In Peking From The Perspective Of Postcolonial Theory

Lin Yutang is a leading pioneer in bridging the East and the West cultures, and his masterpiece Moment in Peking is an outstanding interpretation of Chinese society and the life activities of Chinese people in semi-colonial and semi-feudal China. The book has a great cultural value and has obtained a huge success in cross-cultural communication. It has opened a window for western people to look into Chinese culture and made Lin Yutang the candidate of Nobel Prize for literature in1975. Its great achievements offer the scholars in translation field an excellent reference book and precious experience with regard to the strategies of publicizing Chinese culture in the current context of cultural globalization.Moment in Peking is featured by the blending of writing and translating. And the various kinds of cultural translation contents gathered the essence of the traditional Chinese culture. It is different from a traditional translation in terms of the complexity of the source texts, for the source text mainly comes from every aspect of Chinese culture and society (including ecological culture, social culture, material culture, religious culture and linguistic culture and so on). Actually it is a process of reconstruction and transplantation of various forms of Chinese culture, which is the perfect combination of Chinese culture and English language realized by the mutual integration and combination of writing and translating. This kind of rendering in the specific historical context could not be explained by the traditional translation model and needs a new angle of analysis for its specialty. And postcolonial theory is different from the traditional translation theory, because it concerns about the culture and society rather than the language itself. Postcolonial translation theorists often approach cultural communication from the point of the minority and weak culture and consider translation as a channel of decolonization. Postcolonial study provides a strong theoretical support for cultural hybridity. Homi Bhabha put forward "cultural hybridity" and advocated "the third Space" of cultural communication, which is regarded as the core of postcolonial practice, with the expectation of cultural mediating, rearrangement and penetration.This thesis attempts to analyze the various cultural translation embedded in Moment in Peking from a postcolonial perspective, bringing out Moment in Peking as a relatively high degree of hybridity text. For many Chinese cultural elements are hybridized in it and the original cultural flavor is maximally preserved, which greatly manifests the characteristics of hybridity in the target text. Furthermore, the elaborately created context in the novel and the relative explanation added to the cultural terms make the foreign culture with strong Chinese flavor more accessible and acceptable by the western readers. Finally it makes Chinese culture successfully enter into the western language culture system, realizing the aim of cultural mediating and penetration. The success of Lin Yutang’s Moment in Peking in transmitting Chinese culture proves that the hybridity of cultural translation can be manifested by various translation strategies and methods, and different cultures can get better transmission by hybridity as well.In addition, the corpus of Moment in Peking is built and tagged according to the hybridized cultural categories, with the purpose to get a direct and objective impression of the diversity and features of the translated cultural elements in the book.