A Rereading Of Lin Shu's Translations: A Perspective Of Toury's Translational Norms

Lin Shu, whose translation of foreign literary works is a special phenomenon in China's translation history, often arouses debate in China's translation circle. On one hand, he was the one who started the practice of translating foreign literary works into Chinese literature, whose translation rendered a legend in China's translation history because both of its huge quantity and its great influence; on the other hand, as a translator who knew no foreign languages, he often adopted the way of free translation, and omission/abridgement is not rare in his translations, so his translations often invite derogatory comments.Through a review of various comments and studies about Lin's translations, a conclusion is drawn: most of previous studies adopted linguistics-based and source-oriented research methods, which examined translation as a separate entity out of social and cultural contexts. However, every translation is the product of certain period of time. Since different translators of different times have different translation goals, they always adopt various translation strategies to adapt the source text to meet their own translation purposes. Therefore, those linguistics-based and source-oriented methods are deficient in dealing with Lin's translations in a fair and objective way. In recent years, some target-oriented translation theories from the West provide us with some new perspectives and make a further understanding of Lin's translations possible. Gideon Toury is one of the most prominent figures in this field, whose translation theory is based on the hypothesis that translation is a norm-governed activity. He extended "norm" from a prescriptive concept into a descriptive one, which provides people with the possibility of understanding translation in a relative way. According to him, translation, governed by norms, is not a static concept, but rather changeable as the norms change. As a "fact" in the target culture, translation is restricted by many variables, such as those of culture, society and history, etc.Taking Toury's translational norms theory as its theoretical framework, this thesis carries out an examination of Lin's translations in their social and cultural contexts. The present author analyzes Lin's translations from three different levels, i.e. initial norm, preliminary norms and operational norms, at the same time taking into account of the forwards, postscripts written by Lin for his translations and the comments by the critics on his translations, attempting to excavate and explain the deep reasons for Lin's translation strategies. The conclusion is that Lin's translations achieved the intended aims and were in accordance with the translational norms of his time.