On The English Translation Of Five Spice Street From The Perspective Of Toury’s Norm Theory

Can Xue’s works have been published more than six million words since 1985 when Can Xue initially started her writing career.At the moment,she is of repute in western countries especially the United States.As all the works read by western readers are the translated English version of the original text,translation plays a critical role in the process of Can Xue’s works going abroad and gaining recognition.Translational norm theory proposed by Toury is the core of Toury’s Descriptive Translation Study and aims to reconstruct norms that translators observed during the whole process of translation.It is used across the world in translation field in order to exposit that,among different countries and cultures,what role translation has played and what are the influencing factors during translation process.The author takes Can Xue’s first fulllength novel,as well as the most autobiographical work Five Spice Street as a case study to disclose how the work is translated,what are the factors that influence translators’ decisions,and what is the relation between the factors and the acceptance of the work from the perspective of Toury’s translational norm theory.This thesis is designed to be qualitative research.Descriptive study and comparative analysis are the major methods applied to conduct this study.There are three key findings are drawn in this thesis.Firstly,English translation of Five Spice Street highly leans on the core concept,text structure,and diction style of original text,which can be taken as adequate translation.Massive authentic and idiomatic words of target language are applied to enhance the work’s readability showing as an acceptability of translation.Meanwhile,a large amount of defamiliarized translation was considered by translators during the translation process.Secondly,the translation completed to be like this is because the primary goal for translating this work is to preserve Can Xue’s literary value,to create novel reading experience and to guarantee readability of the work.Lastly,the research finds out that it is the joint efforts by the English translator,the Chinese translator,the editor,and the writer herself have made accurate prescription for the work and realized these goals.Consequently,the work is widely accepted in the literary field in the United States.Starting from Toury’s translational norm theory,the way that this research finds features of translated text through textual analysis,reconstructs the translational norms,then combines the acceptance and extra-textual recourses of the work in target market to deduce the relations between those norms and acceptance of the research subject,could shed some lights on future translation studies for Chinese literature going abroad and studies of overseas acceptance.Moreover,since acceptance of the English translation of the work is successful,demonstration and explanation for the translation model is meaningful in providing an accessible translation mode that is practical and realistic for future translations of Chinese literature.