A Study On Translation Strategies In Lin Yutang’s C-E Translation Of Six Chapters Of A Floating Life From The Perspective Of Translation Ethics

Translation is not only a process of language transformation, but also a process of ethics communication between ethics of the source culture and that of the target culture. As early as 1984, Antoine Berman put forward the concept of translation ethics. In 2001, Andrew Chesterman proposed and improved the five translation ethics models based on previous research: the ethics of representation, the ethics of service, and the ethics of communication, the norm-based ethics, the ethics of commitment. He holds that the essential elements in translation are inevitably ethical, which acquires that the translator should try his best to balance those elements to successfully achieve cross-cultural communication. With the growing emergence of ethically social issues, the research on translation ethics is increasingly valued. Therefore, it is of theoretical and practical significance to study the specific applications of the translation ethics models in a translated work.Lin Yutang, a master of Chinese and English languages and cultures, has contributed a lot to introducing Chinese culture to the West. Six Chapters of a Floating Life is one of his most outstanding translations. Once published, it received widely enduring favor, which greatly depends on the wise decisions of translation strategies. With the strategy of “proposing Chinese culture going out”, the results of exploring the relationship between Lin Yutang’s applications of translation strategies and those of the translation ethics theory will be valuable to our translating Chinese literary works into English. Consequently, the research has significant research value as well as high practical value.Based on translation ethics, the thesis analyzes and concludes the translation strategies under each translation ethics model on lexical and syntactic levels in Lin Yutang’s translation of Six Chapters of a Floating Life(1936) by way of statistical data analysis and detailed descriptive method. Thus, the research aims at exploring the internal relationship between the five translation ethics models and the translation strategies.The thesis consists of seven chapters. Chapter One introduces the research background, objectives, significance and the thesis structure. In Chapter Two, the research on Lin Yutang’s translation of Six Chapters of a Floating Life and translation ethics is reviewed and the shortcomings of the previous research are pointed out. First, theoretical research is emphasized while research on specific applications in translated works is ignored. Second, most theses are of arbitrariness and lack of data support. Chapter Three is theoretical framework, which introduces the return to ethics and especially clarifies Chesterman’s five translation ethics models. Chapter Four includes the research questions, methods and procedure. Besides, the data collection and data analysis are also introduced. Chapter Five and Chapter Six are the main parts of the thesis. In Chapter Five, the applications of translation strategies under each translation ethics model are investigated. First, the characteristics of each translation ethics model are summarized. Next, the examples of applying translation strategies to each translation ethics model are collected in the data and some typical examples are analyzed in detail descriptively. Chapter Six investigates the applications of the major translation ethics models under domestication and foreignization. In Chapter Seven, conclusion, limitations of the present research and suggestions for further research are listed briefly.The conclusion of this thesis are as follows: in Lin Yutang’s translation of Six Chapters of a Floating Life, under the ethics of representation: foreignization is used to represent the sound of the source language while domestication is mainly used to represent the meaning of the source language; under the ethics of service, foreignization is used to serve the original author while domestication is mainly used to serve the target readers; under the ethics of communication, domestication is mainly used to reach the goal of linguistic understanding as well as cultural communication while foreignization also plays an important role; under the norm-based ethics, domestication is mainly used to meet the professional norms as well as the expectancy norms; under the ethics of commitment, both domestication and foreignization are used while the percentage of foreignization is a little more than that of domestication. Furthermore, when there are conflicts among the other four translation ethics models, the ethics of commitment requires selecting the optimal model. Domestication is mainly used under the ethics of service, the ethics of communication and the norm-based ethics while foreignization is mainly used under the ethics of representation and the ethics of commitment.