Standardize The Local Socialization Of Conflicts, Translation Practices And Norms

This study takes as its major academic concern the process-tracing,mechanism-seeking and mechanism-verifying of norm diffusion helped by translating practice against an international background under the light of the mutual construction of structure and agent as its analytic framework with main reference to three theoretical prerequisites,namely,the inter-lingual nature of international politics,the trans-cultural tendency of norm diffusion and the cultural integration guaranteed by translating practice.To start with,this research effort,based on historical facts,puts forward the research question of what the process may be like for a foreignly new international norm to get domestically diffused whereas it comes into a structural disagreement with the existent one in terms of culture? As is shown by the literature review which mainly involves three research topics,i.e.,the development of norm diffusion research,the paradigm shift of translation studies and a translation perspective of norm diffusion,on the one hand,the third wave of norm diffusion research pays more attention to norm contestation,norm localization mechanism and the processes for norms to change in meaning and to be received;on the other hand,translating practice can be a mechnism to plunge into a norm diffusion process both because of the demands generated from translation studies' own development and of the previous researches concerning the application of translating practice to international norm diffusion.The purpose to combine translating with practice here is to underscore that translating as an activity can serve as a bridge or a go-between to link the translators as agents with the socio-cultural structure in their mutually constructive interplay,a direct indicator of the subjectivity and purposefulness of the translators.To put it in detail,on the one hand,translating practice as a purposeful trans-lingual and trans-cultural action must happen within the confines of the socio-cultural structure;one the other hand,translators as social actors are endowed with their subjectivity and purpose,so they can facilitate changes to happen to the socio-cultural structure over a certain histrical period.What comes next is the arguementation conducted as follows.Firstly,it discusses the theoretical opportunity for the encounter of international political studies with translation studies.That is,the two disciplines both have undergone the “sociological turn” on their research course,which makes it possible to conduct a relationship study between the cultural structure and the translators as agents in the context of sociology.Secondly,it details the three premise assumptions for translating practice to get involved in the international diffusion of norms,namely,the inter-lingual nature of international politics,the trans-cultural tendency of norm diffusion and the cultural integration guaranteed by translating practice,based on which this research puts forward the theoretical model regarding the participation of translating practice in the international diffusion of norms.Thirdly,it keeps a chronological track of the participation of translating practice in the international diffusion of norms shown in four phases to trace sovereignty as a norm getting diffused in China with the help of translating different works of international laws from the West.Fourthly,it analyzes the process mechanism of translating practice participating in the international diffusion of sovereignty as a norm,a verification of the research hypothesis at once.The conclusion part summarizes the main findings of this research,analyzes the shortcomings of this study,and puts forward the future research concerns.The foundings of this dissertation are that the diffusion of sovereignty as a norm in China is a process of localized socialization of this new norm.In this case,for the sake of entering the international family of nations based on the Western principle of equal sovereignty by re-defining its identity,foreignization as a culturally translating strategy can promote the socialization of an international norm via transplanting the source language culture whereas domestication as another culturally translating strategy can promote the localization of an international norm via conforming to the culture of the target language.Thus,the diffusion of international norms helped by the translating practice is a process traveling from conflict of norms to integration of norms.And reasonably,as an inter-lingual and cross-cultural behavior in social communication,translating practice is an effective means to reshape the identity of the agent and an important vehicle of the agent to transform the existent cultural structure.