Exploration of Yixie (Rewriting) in Chinese Cultural Translation

Chinese writers, on the mainland and overseas (henceforth “Chinese writers” for short), have introduced abundant Chinese culture in their English works, ostensibly in original writing, but in fact full of translation of Chinese cultural essence, ranging from culture-loaded terms, unique Chinese cultural phenomena to classical works. Without explicit proclamation, these Chinese writers performed translation at the “disguise” of writing. There is no clear demarcation between their “writing” and “translation”. It is neither writing nor pure linguistic translation, but rather translation and writing in combination. Yixie (literarily rendered as translation writing), a term with its ready existence in Chinese, naturally stands out to label this phenomenon. Partially due to the tolerance of vagueness in Chinese traditional culture, since the term Yixie consists of two individual Chinese characters, meaning respectively translation(yi) and writing (xie), its rigid definition has been exempted from the demand of the academia. Nevertheless, the absence of the rigorous meaning of the term leads to the leeway of its random usage. This research will do the pioneering work to formulate the theoretical concept of Yixie and its model in translation studies through case studies of the typical Yixie works by Lin Yutang and Eileen Chang in the 1930s, including their trans-writing and self-translation. By approaching Yixie phenomenon from Descriptive Translation Studies and Comparative Literature Studies, the research will answer the following questions: 1. What is the concept of Yixie (Rewriting) in Chinese culture? 2. How does Yixie (Rewriting) phenomenon work in the framework of transnational literature? 3. How does Yixie works help construct the Chinese cultural image in the US?