Cultural Image Transmission In Lin Yutang’s Translation Of Essays In The Ming And Qing Dynasties

Since the "cultural turn" in translation academia from the1970s, translation is no longer merely viewed as a process of language transformation and meaning reproduction. Considering the differences among languages and cultures, translation has become an important form of cultural exchange. In view of promoting traditional Chinese culture, the cultural images with strong Chinese flavor have always been a headache. Effective cultural image transfer requires extensive cultural knowledge and profound language proficiency, which enables the translator to retain the source language cultural information and cater the TL readers’reading habits and aesthetic taste in the process of translation.As a famous writer and translator in modern China, Mr. Lin Yutang made a huge contribution to introducing traditional Chinese culture to the western world. Lin translated many Chinese classical literary works covering philosophical classics, essays, poems, short stories, biographies of well-known scholars, etc, which represent the essence of Chinese literature and culture. In1960, Lin Yutang published The Importance of Understanding in the United States. This book is a collection of Lin’s translation of classical Chinese works, including a great number of essays written in the Ming and Qing Dynasties with a free and fluent writing style similar to Lin’s avocation of "humor and leisure" style. These essays are full of cultural images, which embody the essence of traditional Chinese culture. Lin’s essay translation works not only transfer the original meaning of the source texts, but also retain the cultural images with "Chinese flavor" to western readers, making them well-received in the English world.Based on the materials from The Importance of Understanding, this thesis intends to explore the translation strategies adopted by Lin Yutang in the process of rendering or reconstructing the culture images in translating essays in Ming and Qing dynasties. Besides, according to Nida’s classification of culture, this paper divides the cultural images into five categories, namely ecological cultural image; material cultural image; social cultural image; religious cultural image and linguistic cultural image. In the process of cultural image transmissions, whether the culture-shared and culture-specific ones, Lin Yutang tends to preserve the original imageries in the source text through literal translations or interpretations plus notes. For several Chinese-peculiar cultural images, Lin chooses image-transformation, image-omission or image-addition to transfer the original images. In his translated works, most of the images have their preservations, which not only retain the flavor, style and beauty of the original text, but also transfer the classic Chinese culture to the largest extent.