A Study On The English Translation Of China’s National Defense White Papers From The Perspective Of Toury’s Norm Theory

Since the reform and opening-up drive was carried out, the exchange between China and the rest of the world has been getting increasingly frequent. In order to provide the world with a better understanding of China, the Information Office of the State Council of China publishes China’s governmental white papers as well as their English versions, which is an authoritative way for the other countries to know China. And the publication of China’s National Defense White Papers (CNDWP) has further promoted the military communications between China and the other countries, which set up mutual trust between them. Therefore, the English versions of CNDWP play a significant role in international communication. In recent years, an increasing number of scholars at home and abroad have made some researches on the English translation of CNDWP. They have proposed their own viewpoints and achieved some research results based on various theories. However, most of the studies are prescriptive.1970s saw the emergence of descriptive translation studies (DTS). One of the most important representatives of DTS is the Israeli scholar, Gideon Toury, who puts forward norm theory on the basis of Even Zohar’s polysystem theory and James Holmes’theory of translation studies. In his monograph, Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond, Toury introduces norm theory in great detail and discusses the three translational norms by which translators abide during the translation process, namely, initial norms, preliminary norms, and operational norms.The present paper attempts to analyze the influences of the three translational norms on the English translation of CNDWP based on the existing researches combimng with the translation phenomena in the present English versions of CNDWP. The study indicates that every stage of the process of rendering CNDWP into English, including the selection of the source text, the employment of translation strategies and the adoption of specific translation techniques, etc., is governed by translational norms. Firstly, the nature and purposes of CNDWP determine that translators should try to strike a balance between "adequacy" and "acceptability". Secondly, while choosing the translation object, influenced by translation policy as well as the directness of translation, the original CNDWP in Chinese is selected to be the source text. Thirdly, operational norms function during the actual translation process. Operational norms are divided into matricial norms and textual-linguistic norms. Under the influence of matricial norms, and because of the special nature of CNDWP, translators choose not to carry out large-scale changes of the original text. And influenced by textual-linguistic norms, following the target language’s conventions of expression, translators employ some proper translation strategies as well as skills like addition, omission, shift, etc. What calls for special attention are the phrases which have their conventional translations. Since they have got fixed English versions in the translation practice, translators should adopt such versions in order to achieve consistency as well as acceptability of the translation.Taking Toury’s norm theory as the theoretical framework, the present paper studies the English translation of CNDWP from a new perspective, with the hope that it may offer some guidance for the translation study and practice of CNDWP.