Study on Lin Shu’s Translation Style and Its Formation

Abstract

Lin Shu brought the style of elegance and succinctness of the ancient Chinese prose into his translation, but he also tried his best to convey the style of the original to readers. When rendering various original styles, he naturally brought the “inelegant” and “insuccinct” elements into the translation, thus weakening elegance and succinctness to some extent. Nevertheless, the “elegant and succinct” elements in his translation was maintained at a relatively high proportion as a whole, so his translation style could still be categorized as that of “elegance and succinctness”. In terms of its dynamic formation, it was closely related to the translator, target readers and translation cultural strategy. To be specific, Lin Shu’s good command of classical Chinese prose, the stylistic preference of traditional literati and scholar bureaucrats, as well as the translation cultural strategy of assimilating the foreign languages with Chinese style, all contributed to the formation of Lin’s translation style.