A Study On The Translating Rewrite Strategy In Famous Chinese Short Stories In The Light Of Poly-System Theory

Inspired basically by Even-Zohar’s Poly-system theory, together with Toury’s preliminary norms and Lefevere’s views about ideology, poetics and patronage, this thesis takes Lin Yutang’s rewriting Famous Chinese Short Stories as a study case, with the help of Wordsmith Tool4.0that possesses powerful retrieval function, to prove that various dominate ideologies and cultural factors have a big influence on Lin Yutang’s rewriting strategies. At present, only few of researches have carried out on such study about the specific rewriting phenomena, especially, relating Poly-system theory with rewriting strategies. Some scholars like Mona Baker, Toury and Zhao Wenjing, etc. with their tireless efforts, have Poly-system theory and practice combined firmly, and expanded this research at large scale.Lin Yutang, a cultural giant and a versatile scholar, had been extensively discussed from different perspectives both within and outside China, but few of studies could give an adequate account to Lin’s rewriting works from the translation angle. In fact, these particular accounts played an essential part to explain how he made a significant contribution to Chinese culture propagation, so Lin’s rewriting activity and his rewriting strategies are valuable to translation study.For his diversity of rendering, Lin Yutang dedicates to modify target text bravely rather than pursue the equivalence between the details of the target text and those of the source text. Furthermore, the rendering of blending writing and translation can not be explained by equivalence-based theory. Coincidently, Poly-system theory regards translation as a specific behavior under the influence of given culture and overcomes the limitation of equivalence-based translation. Besides the culture is an essential element for guiding this specific behavior, and it provides various systematic influencing factors for researching on this specific behavior (including:political factors, economic factors, sensational factors and cultural factors, etc.). So the facts prove that Poly-system theory provides a theoretical basis for analyzing rewriting strategies.In addition, the corpus of Famous Chinese Short Stories is built and tagged according to different rewriting strategies. With the help of retrieval function of Wordsmith Tool4.0, the research results will be much more reliable and objective.The results show that various rewriting strategies have been chosen by Lin Yutang under influence of various factors. Therefore, this justifies the suggestion that we should choose correct translation strategies to fulfill the readers’ cultural requirement in the process of translation or rewriting. At the same time, the thesis explores a new attempt for translation study and a new approach for the propagation of Chinese culture.