A Study On The Chinese Translations Of Gone With The Wind From Perspective Of Chesterman's Translation Norms

The translation norm theory is significant in the descriptive translation approach. The major representatives Gideon Toury, Andrew Chesterman and Theo Hermans have substantially contributed to the study and to the development of the concept of norms in and for translation studies. The academic field in China has always attached great importance to the studies on translation norms and this theory is applied more and more by the translators and in the translation activities. This thesis aims to study the Chinese translations of Gone with the Wind from the perspective of Chesterman's translation norms. A lot of Chinese translation researchers have already studied the Chinese translation of Gone with the Wind from diverse perspectives; however, they have rarely mentioned it from the perspective of translation norms, especially Chesterman's translation norms, thus it is brand new in studying the translation of this distinguished novel.This thesis starts with the introduction, which presents the research background and significance of this study, as well as provides a general framework of this thesis. The part of Literature Review gives some background information to Gone with the Wind, reviews the status in quo of previous domestic researches on the Chinese translations of Gone with the Wind from a variety of perspectives and consequently, puts forward the innovation in this thesis with regard to the research on the Chinese translations of Gone with the Wind from a new and different perspective. And then the author of this thesis displays the theoretical framework of this thesis, reviews the development of translation norm theory such as Toury's norm theory and focuses on Chesterman's norm theory in particular. Chesterman divided translation norms into expectancy norms and professional norms and the latter one can be subdivided into the accountability one, the communication one and the relation one.Based on Chesterman's theories, this thesis takes two Chinese versions of Gone with the Wind as a case study to discuss how the expectancy norms, accountability norms, communication norms and relation norms mentioned by Chesterman are conformed to in these two versions respectively and in addition, analyses the influence of norms on translation—influence of norms on translation versions and translators and that on translation activities in details. Through the analysis, we can find out that although Fu Donghua's version gives the priority to the interest of readers and Dai Kan et al's version gives priority to the original text and its author, both of them comply with the expectation norms, accountability norms, communication norms and relation norms in their own way to a great extent. Thus we can see that translation is a norm-governed behavior and the translators translate consciously or subconsciously with translation norms in their mind. The norms influence the strategies, methods and the styles of translators and translations in a stronger or weaker degree, thus different translators adopt different ways to conform to the norms. In addition, these norms have a great influence on both the translators and the translation activities, such as the subjectivity of translators, the selection of translation strategies and limitations of norms for translators.In the end, the author of this thesis makes a final conclusion of this research, summarizes the major findings, implications and limitations in this thesis and also puts forward some suggestions for the further study.