A Research On The Translation Of Lin Yutang's Moment In Peking From The Perspective Of Cultural Translation Theory

Cultural translation theory,put forward by Susan Bassnett,has provided translation studies with a significant breakthrough by bringing the translation studies into the category of culture and taking "culture" as the aim and basic unit of translation.Susan Bassnett believes that translation is the communication of both intra-culture and inter-culture instead of a pure linguistic behavior,and also translation equivalence is the cultural functional equivalence between the source text and the target text(1980).With Susan Bassnett's cultural translation theory as the theoretical foundation,the thesis adopts the classification of culture by Zdenek Salzmann(1993)to analyze the translation of cultural information embodied in Lin Yutang's Moment in Peking,which is respectively material culture,behavioral culture and mental culture.Applying cultural translation theory to the analysis of the translation of the cultural information with a case study on Zhang Zhenyu's Chinese version of Moment in Peking,the thesis is to reveal how the theory of cultural translation provides insights to the study of translation and to explore the translation strategies the translator adopts to deal with different content of different cultural categories.Having elaborated on the purpose and significance,and introduced the general organization of the thesis,the thesis makes a literature review of cultural translation theory as well as Lin Yutang's Moment in Peking,and gives the general introduction of Moment in Peking and its two Chinese versions.Focusing on the overall development and detailed descriptions of cultural translation theory,the thesis analyzes the translation of the cultural information in Zhang Zhenyu's Chinese version of Lin Yutang's Moment in Peking,from the perspective of material culture,behavioral culture and mental culture.Eventually,it comes to the conclusion that when faced with different categories of culture,such as material,behavioral,and mental culture,in order to realize the purpose of cultural equivalence,the translation is tackled with different methods and strategies.