A Study On Gladys Yang's Translation Of Furong Zhen From The Perspective Of Toury's Norm Theory

In the 1970s, instead of sticking to "faithfulness" in translation, researchers began to treat translation in an objective and all-round way, therefore, the descriptive translation study developed rapidly as a new trend. "Translational Norms" is an absolutely essential concept in modern translation studies. The theory of translational norms is an important part of translation studies. By the application of and the description to translation norms, the approach intends to provide a way to construct the theoretical system of translation studies and to guide the whole process of translation as well as translation related activities. The Israeli scholar Gideon Toury is one of the most important representatives of the norm theory. He is the first one to study norms from the perspective of translation studies. The central issue of his research is the influence of the target culture on the translation activity and translation product. Based on a great deal of case study, Toury proposed that translation is a norm-governed activity and translational norms can be divided into three categories:initial norms, preliminary norms and operational norms. From the selection of the source text, to the translation strategy to adopt before translation, then to the translation skills used in actual translation process, it is no doubt that the translator is influenced by social-cultural factors and norms.Furong Zhen is the representative work of Gu Hua, an outstanding writer in contemporary China. This novel has won the first Mao Dun Literary Award in 1982. In 1983, as an item of the Panda Books of Chinese Literature magazine, this novel was translated into English by Gladys Yang and published in the west entitled A Small Town Called Hibiscus. Ever since its publication, this English version has been very popular among the western readers and it is regarded as one of the faithful and readable translations in Chinese translation history.Based upon Gideon Toury's norm theory, the thesis makes a comparatively overall study of Gladys Yang's translation of Furong Zhen, from its selection of the source text to the actual adoption of translation strategies. The purpose is to make a thorough and objective analysis of translational norms based on a concrete translation case.This paper mainly consists of six parts. Besides the introduction and the conclusion, Chapter 2 is a review of the researches on norms and researches on the translator Gladys Yang; Chapter 3 is the theoretical basis of this paper, which is a detailed explanation of Toury's norm theory. In Chapter 4, the novel Furong Zhen and its author are briefly introduced, as well as its English version and the translator. In Chapter 5, the body of this paper, a study of Gladys Yang's translation of Furong Zhen was made from the perspective of preliminary norms, initial norms and operational norms respectively, to discover the social-cultural factors and norms that determine the translator's choice. At last, it was concluded that the translator was influenced by translational norms at different stages of the translation process.