A Corpus-based Analysis of Attitudinal Changes in Lin Yutang's Self-translation of Between Tears and Laughter

Attitude is omnipresent in almost every type of text. There has yet to be any relevant research on attitudinal shifts in self-translation. The Chinese version of Between Tears and Laughter is a rare case of self-translation and co-translation in that the first 11 chapters are self-translated by Lin Yutang, and the last 12 chapters by Xu Chengbin. The current study conducted a word frequency analysis of this book's English and Chinese versions with LIWC and AntConc, and made comparative research into Lin Yutang's attitudinal changes. The results show that due to different writing purposes and readerships, there is less anger in Lin's self-translation (M=0.7755, SD=0.3861), which is a significant difference (t=2.2892, This attitudinal change is also reflected in the translations of some n-grams containing anger words. In contrast, there is no significant difference (t=1.88, This paper believes that corpus tools can help co-translators keep their translation consistent in attitude. Introduction Lin Yutang (1895 - 1976), the author of My Country and My People and Moment in Peking, was a world-renowned Chinese writer publishing novels, essays, translations, textbooks, and Chinese-English dictionaries, making outstanding achievements in literature, translation, and language research. He even invented a Chinese typewriter. He wrote more than 30 books in English, most of which describe China's cultural aspects. According to the biography of Lin Yutang written by his daughter Lin Taiyi, Lin was nominated twice for the Nobel Prize for Literature (Lin 1989).