A Report On The E-C Translation Of By The Sea (Excerpt) Based On Toury’s Theory Of Translation Norms

By the Sea is the sixth novel written by Abdulrazak Gurnah,the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021.Set in the Zanzibari Revolution of 1964,it tells a story of two main protagonists,Omar and Mahmud.Omar entered Britain as a refugee and then he met his former enemy Mahmud.In a foreign country,they decided to heal the feud rife and to make a reconciliation with their past,jointly facing the discrimination of the “half-African-and-half-European” identity.Taking By the Sea as the source text,under the guidance of Toury’ Theory of Translation Norms,this report adopts the case study method and summarizes the difficulties in the translation process and the translation norms followed.The author finds out that translation is an activity governed by norms.Initial norms are the most basic norms running through the whole process of translation.The norms determine the translator’s tendency towards the source text or the target text.The translation needs to keep a balance between acceptable translation and adequate translation.On the cultural level,the translator follows the source culture norms and adopts the strategy of adequacy to deal with Islamic-cultural words and sentences with African culture.On the linguistic level,the translator pays more attention to the acceptability of the target readers,and thus adopts the strategy of acceptable translation to solve the problems of subject exchange,part of speech conversion and idiom translation.Operational norms consist of matricial norms and textual-linguistic norms,which determine the final form of the translation.Matricial norms guide the translator to deal with macro-level problems,such as adding and deleting words,and changing sentence positions.Textual-linguistic norms guide translators to deal with micro-level problems,such as the syntactic structure and italics translation.