Oral translator's "traces" in the Chinese co-translation of David Copperfield

A feature in the translation history of China in the early 20th century was the collaboration between a Chinese monolingual and a bilingual in a large-scale translation of Western fiction. Such a collaboration pattern lasted for almost two decades before the emergence of the New Cultural Movement in the 1920s. The partnership of Lin Shu (1852-1924} (a prominent “monolingual” translator) and Wei Yi (1880-1933) (one of Lin Shu's oral translators) lasted for nine years, during which they translated over forty English novels into Chinese. Through textual analyses of their co-translation of Charles Dickens's David Copperfield in 1908, this article will reveal the traces of the oral translator in the translated text in three aspects: annotations; transliteration and code-mixing; and explication of implicit information in the original.