A Study On The Importance Of Understanding:from The Perspective Of Venuti’s Theory

This thesis explores a part of passages of The Importance of Understanding under the guidance of Lawrence Venuti’s translation theory in the way of both qualitative and quantitative analysis.Lin Yutang is a leading pioneer in bridging the East and the West cultures. He devoted all his life to introduce Chinese culture to the whole world. He has made great contributions to convey Chinese culture and his work has opened a window for western people to look into Chinese culture. The Importance of Understanding, one of the collections of Lin Yutang’s English versions, consists of more than one hundred translations. From poetry and prose, to narratives and argumentations, from Confucianism and Taoism, to culture and history, Lin Yutang has propagated the classic works to the world through translation. In other words, through translation, Lin Yutang has carried forward and further developed Chinese glorious culture.In recent years, the American translation theorist, Lawrence Venuti, has called much attention from the world translation field. He has criticized and challenged the traditional domesticating translation, and has come to the conclusion that the objective of translation is to try to reserve the "foreignness" instead of seeking similarity. Venuti has advocated the foreignization strategy with an aim to make the translator visible in translation practice, and promote the translator’s status. Meanwhile, foreignizing translation strategy also can resist the cultural hegemony from the strong culture, promote the status of weak culture, and enrich the strong culture.Since Lin Yutang’s translation of Chinese classics firstly published during the early19th century, they are non-mainstream and marginal to the western society at that time, such background accords with Venuti’s cultural resistance theory. This thesis analyzes Lin Yutang’s translation works in The Importance of Understanding through both qualitative and quantitative analysis in the light of Venuti’s translation theory, and the result shows that the foreignness in selection of the original text, linguistic forms and cultural level exists prominently in Lin Yutang’s versions. Dealing with such foreignness, Lin Yutang mainly adopted transliteration, literal translation, literal translation added with annotation and other translation skills, which preserve the differences between language and culture and promote the communication between Chinese culture and western culture.Due to the length and time limitation, however, this study only covers limited translation works in the book The Importance of Understanding. Therefore, it would be imperative and necessary for a further study to cover more passages in this book, so the research result would be more representative and valuable.