As a famous writer and translator, Lin Yutang has made outstanding contributions to promoting cultural exchanges between China and the West, especially in introducing China culture to the West. Lin Yutang's translation is characterized by fluency and understandability, and rarely uses jargon, which can be understood by readers of middle culture, which is also the result of his exploration.
1936, Lin Yutang wrote 260 pages of The Art of Life. He thinks the language is abstruse and the argument is boring, which will lose readers. So he started again, using a set of words to observe the delicate and moving oriental sentiment such as wind, cloud, rain, snow, moon, mountain, water and stone.
Lin Yutang's translation principles
In On Translation, Mr. Lin Yutang put forward these three requirements for translators, which require not only a thorough understanding of the original text, but also a certain ability of expression and a certain mastery of translation skills and standards.
Lin Yutang put forward that "when discussing translation, we need to study its linguistic and psychological problems", in other words, "translation problems can be said to be linguistic and psychological problems".
Lin Yutang thinks: "If we want to solve this problem objectively, we should base our argument on the analysis of linguistic psychology. We must first understand the facts of language and writing psychology before we can draw a conclusion about what the translator's standard should be and what his attitude should be. " Mr. Lin Yutang is the first person in the history of translation studies in China to take modern linguistics and psychology as the basis of "theoretical analysis" of translation theory.