A Study On Lin Yutang’s Famous Chinese Short Stories From The Perspective Of André Lefevere’s Rewriting Theory

Lin Yutang, as a great master of literature and translation, has made a significant contribution to Chinese-Western cultural exchanges and was honoured as the "unofficial Chinese culture ambassador." In recent years, the study of Lin Yutang and his works became an academic hotspot. Interpretations on Lin and his works from various perspectives are in blossom. As an important part of his works, Lin’s translations also got more and more attention.The Cultural Turn in translation studies breaks the constraint of the text by focusing its eyes on culture and society. The rewriting theory proposed by André Lefevere mainly studies rewriters’ rewritings including translations and their rewriting strategies or translational strategies under the control of a certain ideology and a certain poetics in a given society at a given time.This Thesis studies Lin’s translation(or anthology/adaptation to some extent) —Famous Chinese Short Stories from the perspective of rewriting theory. The volume was in fact accomplished and published in the United States in 1952. This thesis analyzes the ideology and the poetics of American society at that time and gets the conclusion that Lin’s personal ideology and poetics are basically in line with the western mainstream. This study gets the conclusion that Lin Yutang, under the control of his ideology and poetics, selects certain texts to translate and mainly adopts a domesticating strategy in his translation by rewriting the social ethics, social symbols, social habits as well as literary techniques to make the volume better meet the western ideology and poetics.At the end of this thesis, the author gives an overall evaluation on Lin’s translation. It shows that although there appears some deficiencies, mainly, too much rewritings in Lin’s volume, it is still a successful translation which attracted lots of western readers’ interests on Chinese culture. Considering the specific background that Chinese culture and literature were obviously at a disadvantage in that period, Lin achieved his intention of translation and made great contribution to the spreading of Chinese culture. At the end of this thesis, the author proposes some advice for the literature translation from Chinese to foreign languages inspired by Lefevere’s rewriting theory and Lin Yutang’s translation.