“One mind seeks the learning of ancients and moderns; two legs straddle the cultures of both East and West”, Lin Yutang, as a outstanding writer and translator, actually lives up to this couplet he wrote for himself. “His most English literary works are translated by other translators. Instead, he devoted himself to Chinese-English translation area.”(Wang Shaodi, 2011:5)Moreover, he has a lot of typical translated works such as The Wisdom of Confucius, The Wisdom of Laotse and Six Chapters of a Floating Life and so on. There are abundant translation thought and practice hidden in his translated works, which is worth getting further research. In addition to translated works , he wrote some literary works himself too such as My Country, My People, Life in China and Moment in Peking and so on to introduce Chinese culture and life style to the West. What the author wants to stress is its practical and theoretical values in translation “since Lin Yutang constantly provides scholars with research source according to his great works and special thought. In the same way, the result of these studies promotes the whole development of human and society science.”(Wang shaodi, 2011:5)

2. Literature Review

     “At the end of 1924, Yusi and Modern Crisis were published.” (Shi Jianwei, 1997:151)In 1926, Lin became one of the writers of Yusi. In 1932, Lu Xun wrote some essays to criticize Lin’s humor including “From Humor to Seriousness” and “The Crisis of essay”. In 1934, “On Lin Yutang” authored by Hu Feng, another representative writer, was published in literature. He paid attention to Lin’s “humor”, “essay” and “hsingling”. Between 1943 to 1944, Lin Yutang was also criticized by Guo Moruo who wrote an essay entitled “Ti Xiao Jie Shi ”, a satirical parody of one of Lin’s earlier work “Ti Xiao Jie Fei ”. “Lin Yutang neither knows himself clearly nor knows others generally. He merely shows his Pidgin English although he knows little about East and West.”(Guo Moruo, 1992:402) As a whole, the research on Lin Yutang from 1926 to 1929 is not all-round due to some historical restricts and most views deny his accomplishments to some degree.

During the following thirty years, there were few studies on Lin Yutang or his translation, which resulted from the previous critics mainly came from Lu Xun. This situation didn’t change until the year 1979 when the researches on Lin Yutang were carried out.文献综述

     Since 1979, it occurred one by one that the research on Lin Yutang started again. In the beginning, although studies on Lin gradually turned its renaissance, scholars are still very cautious about carrying out this research. After in 1985, most scholars and translators actually spared no effort to improve Lin’s studies. In 1987, On Lin Yuntang written by Wan Pingjin was the first monograph on Lin Yutang’s life. In his essay, he said, “Lin Yutang learned Western culture widely and he didn’t forget Chinese culture. That’s to say, he is a man whose two legs straddle the cultures of both East and West.” Shi Jianwei, another scholar, studied Lin Yutang too. His book Biography of Lin Yutang researched Lin’s life. “Lin Yutang first translated ‘humor’ into ‘幽默’, which was finally recognized by Lu Xun too.”(Shi Jianwei, 1999:106)Besides, Shi published another two books. One is Lin Yutang in the Mainland and the other is Lin Yutang Abroad. Wang Zhaosheng is another important scholar who studied Lin Yutang. “Lin Yutang admitted that life is fundamentally tragic. Since life is meaningless, we should spend our life with smile or we should be humorous.”(Wang Zhaosheng, 2005:91) In 2005, Peking University Press published a book, Lin Yutang WenHua ZhuanXing De FuHao written by Shi Ping. “From now on, Orientals stress intuition, emotion and sacrifice while Occidentals are always rational.”(Shi Ping, 2005:150)In summary, the researches on Lin Yutang have been improved both in quality and quantity. All of these have provided research source to study further on Lin’s translation thought. 浅析林语堂的翻译思想(2):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_67287.html