Yangbo Wu

Cultural Reconstruction: a Comparative Study Between Two Chinese Versions of "Moment in Peking" Yangbo Wu

In translation between Chinese and English, there exists a special phenomenon. When English literary works about ?Chinese stories? are translated back into Chinese again, it has something to do with cultural reconstruction, or a sort of back-translation. ?Moment in Peking?, one of Dr. Lin Yutang?s representatives, is a typical example of such writings. This book is intended to probe the cultural aspects of ?Moment in Peking? and the reconstruction issue in its two Chinese versions. Based on Peter Newmark?s cultural categories model, this book makes a detailed comparative study of the two translators? different versions in terms of the same categories of cultural elements from the perspective of the translators? subjectivity. It hopes to cast light on improving the back-translation of cultural elements in this kind of special literary works, and builds a more systematic model of assessing the translation of cultural elements of literary works in general.