Translating While Writing, Is This Not Happiness?— On Lin Yutang’s Translation In The Importance Of Living From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

Lin Yutang is the leading pioneer in promoting Chinese culture to the western world. He is famous for his English writing and translation. Combination of translating and writing is the common feature of several of his English best-sellers,among them, The Importance of Living is the most popular one in the west. It introduces leisure life style and expansive living philosophy of Chinese. The book has a great cultural value and makes a great achievement in promoting Chinese culture.The translation in the The Importance of Living is a flexible and adaptable translational phenomenon under the background of writing. This book is featured by the combination of writing and translating. Translation complements writing efficiently in developing the theme, the content and the style of the whole book.However, present studies on the book are mainly concerned with its literary and cultural value but rarely touch the translations in it, let alone the translation under the background of writing.In The Importance of Living, the great amount of translations, the wide range of source texts, and the various forms of translation all break our traditional understanding of translation which is based on the equivalence. The Skopos theory gives a new perspective of translation and frees the translators from the restraint of linguistic and equivalence-based translation theories. Therefore, this thesis takes Skopos theory as the theoretical support, firstly discusses the Skopos of The Importance of Living bases on the translation brief; then, analyzes the translations from the perspective of Skopos theory by adopting Huang Zhonglian’s translation variation which is ranging from full translation to translation variation(selective translation, edited translation, narrative translation, condensed translation, and evaluating translation, etc.); lastly, dissects the loyalty of the translations.The analysis here shows that the Chinese-English translations in The Importance of Living play an essential role for the writing of the work. The Skopos of the translation is the Skopos of the writing, which is also the combination of the requests of initiator, translator and intended readers. With such Skopos, Lin selects the source texts from a great number of Chinese literary works, and partly or wholly translates them, and flexibly but loyally keeps the theme of the source texts and sticks to his Skopos of the book. Lin’s translations are natural, fluent, appropriate and reasonable,and worth our attention and study.