‘A Singular Cross-cultural Poetics in a Dual Discourse’
A Study of Lin Yutang’s Self-translation of the Little Critic Essays and Between Tears and Laughter

Abstract

This thesis approaches Lin Yutang’s Chinese-oriented discourse from his two self-translation projects, rendering respectively his Little Critic column essays and Between Tears and Laughter. The research carried out for this thesis aims to analyse Lin’s self-translation changes, to compare the differences in motivational patterns between these two projects, and to offer possible justification for the unique character of Lin’s text decisions. Due to the heterolinguistic nature of this research project, the research is informed by the domain of Translation Studies, borrowing the broad framework from the ‘architectonics of translation analysis’ by Berman that combine a text analysis and a translator study, and also sources analytical tools from some well-established findings based on linguistics. Hence, this research hopes to enrich the research setting of self-translation in Translation Studies, in the sense that the uniqueness of Lin’s text decisions serves as an example of how self-translators’ decisions differ from allograph translators’.