A Study Of Lin Yutang’s English-Chinese Self-Translation From The Perspective Of Gideon Toury’s Theory Of Translational Norms

As a special form of translation,self-translation can date back to the Medieval Ages and Renaissance in Europe.However,its studies didn’t arise until around 40 years ago.In a globalizing world where self-translation becomes more and more common,such studies can shed some light for future translation practice of the growing bilingual learners.This thesis is intended to explore Lin Yutang’s self-translation from the perspective of Gideon Toury’s theory of translational norms taking Between Tears and Laughter as an example.Gideon Toury is one of the leading figures in descriptive translation studies and the translational norms theory is his essential theory which involves three important norms: initial norm,preliminary norms and operational norms.In regard of preliminary norms,Lin’s selection of Between Tears and Laughter directly translated from source language to target language is not only out of his patriotism,but also influenced by the publishing house as well as the political and sociocultural environment in the target language.In terms of operational norms,Lin makes textual adjustments in the layout of the translated version of Between Tears and Laughter.Moreover,many techniques,including transliteration,literal translation,liberal translation,transference,annotation,addition,antithesis,exaggeration,Chinese four-character idioms and structures and quotation style,are applied to the translation of the foreign names of people and places,the western political terms,the religious terms,the figures of speech and the stylistic features.With regard to initial norm,Lin’s self-translation of Between Tears and Laughter is more adequate than acceptable based on the analysis of the text and the statistics from Douban.On the one hand,Lin employs various methods to translate western items and retains their original flavor to meet readers’ curiosity of outside world.On the other hand,he also frequently uses annotations,Chinese four-character idioms and structures as well as quotation style to make his translation more acceptable.