The Republic Of Wine From The Perspective Of Gideon Toury’s Translation Norm Theories

Gideon Toury, an Israelites scholar, was one of the famous translation theorists, who developed the descriptive translation theory proposed by Holmes and polysystem theory by Even Zohar, thereby forming his own set of complete theories and methods of descriptive translation studies. He emphasized the importance of descriptive translation studies and its targets and scopes, as well as translation norms constrained by translation choices.He introduced three kinds of translation norms:preliminary norms, initial norms and operational norms. Preliminary norms involved relatively complex factors, including translation policies and direction of translation. Initial norms refer to culture norms and orientation of target culture norms. Operational norms are micro-factors which influence translations during the process of translators doing translation.Drawing from the insights of Toury’s translation norms, this thesis seeks to analyze Howard Goldblatt’s English translation of Moyan’s The Republic of Wine by examining how the three translation norms operate in Goldblatt’s translated text, addressing in particular the choice of target languages, the adoption of translation strategies, the choice of words and building of sentences in English version. It argues that Toury’s translation norms help shed light on the success of Goldblatt’s translation, in that it is in keeping with the norms specified in Toury’s theory:Preliminary norms:The choice of text not only depends on political environment, but also on the preferences of audiences, translators’ personal preferences and the choices of source texts by translatorsInitial norms:Goldblatt managed to balance translatability and acceptability in the English version of The Republic of Wine, mainly concentrating on acceptability.Operational norms:the specific operational level, matrix norms and Textual-linguistic norms were applied in the English version of The Republic of Wine, and there were some abridgement, supplement, segment, displacement and the increase of footnotes in the Republic of Wine. The norms were embodied in words, sentence structures, the choice of words and the building of sentences and textual features in micro-level...