关键词: 林译小说; 经济赞助人; 意识形态赞助人; 翻译家身份; 林纾

Abstract:

It is generally held that the establishment of Lin Shu’s translator identity and Lin’s translated fiction brand are attributable to lucky coincidences or personal endowments. This article, however, investigates the social and historical reasons for his great success from the patron perspective by relying on data analysis and text comparison. The article finds that a wide range of patronage-givers performed collaborative but various functions at the different stages or in different aspects of the same stage in his translation career. And the patronage-givers consisted of the social personages at that time, his interpreters, the persons who represented the Tongcheng School and facilitated the New Cultural Movement and diverse publishers. The personages and the publishers then conducted the economy-related functions as his economic patrons, the interpreters and the reformers shaped his translation views as his ideological patrons, and the persons from Tongcheng School and New Cultural Movement controlled the poetics-oriented factors in his translations as his poetological patrons. Seen in this way, those patrons not only played an indispensable role in his earnings, his attitudes towards translation, and his status as a translator, but also made a remarkable contribution to his choice of texts to be translated, and the publication and publication volume of his translations.

Keywords: Lin Shu’s translated novels;; economic patrons; ideological patrons; translator’s identity;; Lin Shu