A Study Of Lin Yutang’s Translation Strategies From The Persective Of Interculturalit

With the development of globalization, the cultural exchanges between differentcountries have increasingly intensified nowadays. A translator’s cultural identity is closelyrelated to his/her translation thoughts and practice. Lin Yutang, the well-known translator,writer and cultural communicator, is renowned both in China and abroad. With his bilingualand bicultural competence, Lin Yutang has translated a lot of ancient Chinese literary worksinto English and greatly promoted the cultural communication between China and the West.Among those works, Six Chapters of a Floating Life is considered Lin’s masterpiece. As thecultural forerunner of the translation academia, Lin has made great contributions to thetransmission of Chinese culture to the Western world with his writings and translations. Hence,it’s of great theoretical and practical significance to study Lin’s translation under the contextof increasingly enhanced global cultural communication.In recent years, more and more scholars have studied Lin’s translation from the culturalperspective, especially the correlation between Lin’s cultural inclination and his translationactivity. However, due to the prevailing thought of binarism in translation field, thetranslator’s cultural inclination is usually pitched to choose either the source culture or thetarget culture. Hence, when it comes to a translator’s choice of translation strategies, theexisting researches often categorize them as either domestication or foreignization. The binarypattern has, to a certain extent, fails to describe and explain the translation phenomenaobjectively.In view of the above problem, this thesis takes ‘interculturality’ as the theoretical basis toprobe into Lin Yutang’s cultural identity and make a further dig out of the cultural sourcesbehind his cultural view. Under the framework of interculturality, the thesis first explores theinfluence of Lin’s cultural identity on his formation of translation thoughts, and then analyzesLin’s application of translation strategies exemplified with his Six Chapters of a Floating Life.The term ‘interculturality’, put forward by Pym (2007) in his Method in Translation History,refers to those beliefs and practices found in intersections or overlaps of cultures, wherepeople combine something of two or more cultures at once. Pym states that the translatordoesn’t belong to one culture only: the source culture or the target culture. To be exactly, thetranslator belongs to the interaction or overlap of the cultures.The research findings are as follows. Immersed in both Chinese culture and Western culture, Lin Yutang forms his unique intercultural identity under the dual cultural backgroundof the East and the West. Affected by his intercultural identity, Lin Yutang forms hiscompromising translation thoughts. His three translation criteria and three requirements fortranslators are the reflections of his intercultural identity on his translation thoughts. Underthe influence of his intercultural identity and compromising translation thoughts, Lin Yutangapplies a series of mediating translation strategies as cultural borrowing, cultural substitutionand cultural compensation. In order to show Western readers the authentic Chinese culture,Lin Yutang adopts the strategy of cultural borrowing to keep the cultural information and theexotic flavor of the original text. Considering the thinking habit of target readers, Lin Yutangapplies cultural substitution to minimize the misunderstandings caused by cultural differences.To fulfill the purpose of preserving the information of the source text and meeting the literarytaste of target readers, Lin Yutang employs the strategy of cultural compensation. By means ofthese mediating translation strategies, his translation neither goes too far from the source textnor gets too close to the target readers, and finally fulfills the goal of promoting culturalexchanges.The study of Lin’s translation strategies from the intercultural point of view not merelyconforms to the current trend of the culture turn in translation academia, but also plays asignificant role in guiding the current translation practice. What’s more, the present study is ofgreat significance for cross-cultural communication in a globalizing era.