A Report On The Translation Of Japanese Girls And Women (Excerpts) From The Perspective Of Translational Norms

Norms,also known as social norms,are the code and standard of behavior shared by all members of a social group.Norms exist in every section of modern society.Translation is no exception.In the 1970 s,Gideon Toury conducted a detailed study on translation norms and proposed three frameworks for translational norms: preliminary norms,initial norms and operational norms.These three frameworks influence translation practice throughout the translation process.Following the norms,translators could accurately comprehend the original texts and improve the quality of translation.Japanese Girls and Women is both a documentary and a literary account of the lives of Japanese women during the Meiji period(1868-1912).It mainly describes the customs of Japanese society and social practices during the Meiji period.Chapters 3,4 and 10 in this book are selected for the translation practice,because the translator is interested in these chapters.Describing the first half of women’s life and different social classes of women,the three chapters are worth reading for readers as well.Guided by the three normative frameworks,appropriate translation techniques such as amplification and division are adopted to convey the style of the source text and control the quality of translation.Due to the different syntactic features and idiomatic expressions of Chinese and English languages,appropriate conversions are necessary in the translation process.For social and cultural information conveyed in the source text,flexible expression can be achieved through techniques such as adding or subtracting based on the context.Some sentences in the source text are lengthy and complex,and in order to ensure clear and natural translation,techniques such as partial translation can be used to facilitate the readers’ understanding.It is hoped that these translation methods summarized in this report could provide some reference and assistance for the translation practices of similar texts in the future.