A Descriptive Study On The Two Chinese Versions Of Tess Of The D'Urbervilles

For a long time, prescriptive translation studies played a dominant role until the 1950s when John McFarlane published an essay 'Modes of Translation', the thoughts of which conform to the Descriptive Translation Studies. Later, lots of scholars made their bits to the development of Descriptive Translation Studies. Among them, Gideon Toury, a professor from Tel Aviv University, is the most eminent figure. He pointed out that "a translation will be any target language text which is presented or regarded as such in a target system, on whatever grounds". Another scholar Maria Tymoczko put it like this "Descriptive translation studies -when they attend to process, product, and function-set translation practices in time and, thus by extension, in politics, ideology, economics, culture." Tess of the D 'Urbervilles is a masterpiece of Thomas Hardy. It enjoys great popularity. Enthusiasm about this book is still booming until now. The writer of this thesis plans to carry out a descriptive translation study on Tess of the D 'Urbervilles (Zhang Guruo's version and Sun Fali's version) from a cultural viewpoint. Norm is the kernel of descriptive translation and it is dynamic, taking shape under interactive influence of various factors such as cultural, political and ideological factors, and changing with time and place. According to Toury, the end-product of any translation is governed by norms. Prescriptive rules should not be the single standard to value the quality of the translation because translation occurs within certain culture but prescriptive rules are all about linguistics and language. This paper intends to justify the two versions rather than judging which one is superior to the other.The author of this thesis will make a comparison between the two Chinese versions under the guidance of initial norms, preliminary norms and operational norms. Under the guidance of initial norms, the author discusses the long debated dichotomy: domestication and foreignization and finds that domestication and foreignization should be complementary to each other rather than contradictory. The two versions are good examples of the combinations of domestication and foreignization. Whether to adopt domestication or foreignization depends on the translator's cultural position and orientation. Under the preliminary norms, the thesis elaborates the cultural background of the translation of the Tess of the D'Urbervilles and the influence Thomas Hardy and his work have on Chinese readers. Through the study of operational norms, the thesis discusses factors governing the same English words or phrases about, namely, dialect, material culture, social culture, habit, customs, and activities being translated into different Chinese terms in the two versions. The thesis also discusses the reason of addition of passages and footnotes, deletions or relocation in the two versions under the guidance of operational norms and finds that sometimes it is to cater for tastes of ' potential readers, sometimes it is controlled by cultural difference and sometimes it is for the purpose of increasing the number of readers or for the educational purpose. In the conclusion part, the author appeals to translators to be aware of the cultural differences he is dealing with and decide which translation strategy to be applied.