A Tentative Study On The Back Translation Of The Vermillion Gate By Lin Yutang

The Vermilion Gate is a novel about Chinese culture written in English by Lin Yutang.Translating such works into Chinese involves a special back translation for which the term has not been unified,though it has been noticed by many translation researchers and scholars."Rootless back translation" proposed by Wang Hongyin is widely approved and is recently revised as "text-less back translation" by himself.We think this term may be better,because the foreign language creation actually has the source culture as its root,therefore no sense of "rootless".What differentiates it from the general back translation is the later has an original text while it has an original culture.Based on the categorization model of cultural elements,the Chinese cultural elements in The Vermilion Gate will be classified,such as into proper names and quotations.A through textual analysis and evaluation of two Chinese versions by Lao Long&Hei Ma and Xie Qixia will be made.Through the detailed study on the two versions,different back translation strategies,translation deficiency and possible reasons,as well as the principles,back translatability and classification will be concluded to provide feasible mode to assess the back translation in the future.Two kinds of back translation will be presented in details,namely the original text restoration and the text-less back translation which brings new thoughts to the nature of translation.Once the original text is found,there is no need to translate.It seems to be more like archaeology than translation,therefore,zero-translation.But if the translator fails to find the original and tries to translate,the accuracy would be a problem.Also,text-less back translation deconstructs the "domestication" and"foreignization",for the source text and the target culture are basically the same thing in two different "language coats".With more and more foreign language creation and cultural communication,more detailed study on back translation seems urgent and necessary,since it is a matter of cultural globalization and local cultural reconstruction.