From "Integrating Modern Western Culture with Ancient Chinese Spirit" to "Dual-Dimension Translation"—Lu Xun’s Approach to Constructing Modernity in Foreign Short Stories

Regarding the conceptual motivation and translational nature of Foreign Short Stories, in which Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren used ancient Chinese characters to render Western modernist novels, it is argued that Lu Xun’s idea of “Integrating modern Western culture with ancient Chinese spirit for a new culture” is the key to proper explanation.Through investigating “Integrating modern Western culture with ancient Chinese spirit ”, arguing that it reflects true modernity consciousness, and uncovering how the translators utilized ancient Chinese spirit and modern Western culture in their target text production, this article proposes: 1) regarding the guiding theory for textual reproduction, Lu Xun rediscovered ancient Plain Studies (Pu Xue) for new application, converging it with Western (modernist) philosophy, and the result was his awakened consciousness of translational authenticity and his assertive interpretation of the critical spirit of the target text; 2) as for target text expression, Lu Xun used moderate literal translation to represent the semantics of the source text, and used archaic characters to refer metonymically to the aggressive spirit of ancient people, so his target text actually combined cross-cultural transformation (traditional translation) in the horizontal dimension and trans-era reference (metonymic translation) in the vertical dimension, both of which constitute a special model of translation, namely, dual-dimension translation.Lu Xun intended to integrate modern Western culture with ancient Chinese spirit to solve the national crisis then, and thus demonstrated true consciousness of modernity.Both “Integrating modern Western culture with ancient Chinese spirit” and “dual-dimension translation” help to dismiss misunderstandings of the unique linguistic feature of Foreign Short Stories.