On Lin Shu’s Translation Of Uncle Tom’s Cabin From The Perspective Of Brazilian Cannibalism

In Chinese and Western traditional translation, the faithful principle is deemed asa prominent standard to judge whether the translation is good or not. Since1970s, withthe emergence of cultural turn in translation, translation is placed in the social, politicaland cultural context which is more extensive and it is not the linguistic transformationbetween two different languages any more. During the late Qing Dynasty, Lin Shu hadno idea about any foreign languages but he brought in considerable foreign literaryworks. His works have caused controversial comments in the translation area. Somescholars were in favor of his translation, while some others criticized his translation.However, those who supported the traditional translation even suggested that Lin Shu’stranslation works cannot be counted as real translation. Even his identity as a translatoris also questioned. In view of the unfair criticism, the author of this thesis is inspired byBrazilian cannibalism to analyze Lin Shu’s translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin1fromcultural context of Chinese semi-colonial days. This version was the first Americanpolitical literary novel which was brought in China by Lin Shu. At that time, China wasbeing confronted with serious national crisis so that Lin Shu wanted to enlighten theChinese people by this novel. Therefore Hei Nu Yu Tian Lu exerts a far-reachinginfluence on literary translation area and it is also rather typical for studying.Brazilian cannibalism is one of the important translation theories in postcolonial translation theory, which was inspired by Derrida’s deconstructionism, and was appliedto translation practice by Brazilian brothers De Campos, both of whom are poets andtranslators. Cannibal translation is a vivid metaphor for Brazilian cultural translation. Itremodels the cultural identity of the third world in the process of translation. It has“copinism” attitude of absorbing the essence and discarding the dross by devouring theoriginal text in order to infuse new blood into the local culture. In Brazilian cannibalism,the traditional faithfulness is not taken as the absolute translation standard. In light ofthe target readers’ needs, the translator should adopt different translation methods andstrategies for emphasizing the target culture. Under the guidance of cannibal translation,the translator advocates conscious mistranslation, misreading and re-creation.In the light of Brazilian cannibalism translation theory, the author has exploredLin Shu’s translation thoughts, the rationality or feasibility of his translation strategies,techniques and the process of eating the source text by describing and analyzing thecases in Hei Nu Yu Tian Lu. In order to present Lin Shu’s unconscious cannibal behaviorin Hei Nu Yu Tian Lu, the author selects many cases from the text to discover theexistence of cannibalism in his translation. In a word, Lin Shu made a great contributionto the development of Chinese literary translation through absorbing the essence offoreign culture, which played a positive role in enlightening the people. At the sametime, it has crucial reference significance in the attitude of assimilating the externalculture.