林语堂《小评论》的自译研究_英语论文

Breaking the Translator’s Silence——A Study on Lin’s Self Translation of The Little Critic

摘要

自译活动由来已久。上世纪初中国文学界掀起自译浪潮，以林语堂，张爱玲，卞之琳、萧乾为代表的当代作家，开始自译自己的原创作品，积累了大量的自译实践经验。尽管如此，对自译的学术研究并没有受到译学界的广泛关注。互联网时代的到来，激励越来越多的人参与到自译活动中来，出现了大量的自译者，但鲜有优秀自译作品问世。本文以操纵理论为理论基础，旨在研究自译者的社会背景，个人经历等因素对其自译风格的影响。为此，本文作者选取林语堂先生的双语小品文集《小评论》作为研究案例，通过文本对比研究发现，林语堂的自译不完全忠实于原文，但也不是一时兴起的重新创作，他在对文本进行改动的同时遵循着一定的原则，更多的是考虑到译文读者。通过研究，本文得出结论认为：自译是一个对作者即译者的双语甚至多语能力有极高要求的活动，自译是当今中国文化“走出去”的一个趋势，值得深入研究，本研究希望相关的自译理论能早日成型，以更好地指导并规范自译市场。

关键词：林语堂；自译；操纵理论

Abstract

Self-translation enjoys such a long history that it can be traced back to the period of ancient Greece and Rome. Many world-famous self-translators were active in the early twentieth century in Chinese literature, represented by Lin Yutang, Eileen Chang, Xiao Qian and Bian Zhilin. At this time, they began to translate their original works by themselves, accumulating a large amount of practical experience of self-translation. In spite of this, academic studies about this issue draw little attention in the field of translation studies. More and more convenient access to the Internet encourages more and more people to take part in all kinds of self-translation activities. However, the number of self-translators is large, while very few of them are well-known for their works. The thesis aims at studying the effects of such factors as self-translators’ social background, living experience on their self-translation styles under the guidance of the manipulation theory. Thus, the author selects Lin’s bilingual anthology The Little Critic which collects all his bilingual essays in 1930s as the studying case. Through the comparative study of those texts, the author finds that Lin Yutang’s self translation is neither loyal to the original texts nor the brand new extemporaneous writing on the same topic. When he translated his works and made some modification, he was obviously obeying some kind of principles in which his major consideration is his readers of translated works. After the study, the author draw the conclusion that self-translation is a highly demanded activity which require our bilingual capability even multilingual capability. Besides, self-translation is a trend in the recent period of going-out of Chinese culture. There’s no denying that self-translation should be attached great importance to. The author hopes this thesis to be helpful to further studies on self-translation and hopes that some certain theories can be brought out as early as possible to standardize self-translation activities.

Key Words: Lin Yutang; self-translation; manipulation theory

Contents

Acknowledgments 

Abstract (Chinese).i

Abstract (English)ii

Introduction1

Chapter One Literature review and theoretical framework 5

1.1 Studies at home and abroad 5

1.2 Manipulation Theory11

Chapter Two Lin Yutang and The Little Critic 11

2.1 Brief introduction to Lin’s The Little Critic11

2.2 Self-translation as the most striking feature of the work 11

Chapter Three How silence is broken in the self-translation process of The Little Critic 11

3.1 Deletion and addition 12

  3.1 1 Words and phrases12

  3.1.2 Sentences and paragraphs 13

3.2 Rewriting14

  3.2.1 Plots15

  3.2 2 Other important information16

3.3 Recreation16

  3.3.1 Characters17

  3.3.2 Contexts17

Conclusion 18

Bibliography22