ABSTRACT
The Yellow Storm is one of Lao She’s most famous novels and also one of the outstanding novels in modern Chinese literary history. The English translation of The Yellow Storm was completed cooperatively by the author Lao She and the translator Ida Pruitt in the late 1940s in the United States. The method of their cooperation was that Lao She rewrote the original text in Chinese, and then Ida Pruitt translated the rewritten Chinese text into English. Lao She rewrote the novel with the obvious intention of aiding Sino-American cross-cultural communication, while Ida Pruitt translated it with an intension of reproducing her memories of her childhood in China. Lao She was not quite satisfied with Ida Pruitt’s translation, which has been considered an “unusual” translation by modern Chinese academics. Lao believed that Pruitt’s unusual translation would hinder his purpose and asked her to modify some decisions such as the choice of English words he thought did not correspond to the Chinese characters. Ida Pruitt refused to follow Lao She’s advice and maintained her unusual English expressions with the support of American writer Pearl S. Buck, who was also a literary agent. I argue that, perhaps counter-intuitively, Pruitt’s unusual translation did not in fact hinder Lao She’s intention of cross-cultural communication, but actually enabled it.
