On Translation Norms Of Literary Translation

In the history of Chinese translation, there were four climaxes, while literary translation emerged in themidand-late period of the third translation climax. Furthermore, novels translation in large scale became themain stream, which witnessed the literary and cultural communication between the West and China and had theprofound impact on the development of Chinese literature. However, these literary translated works have beencriticized for not being faithful to the original for a long time and accordingly they were even not accepted astranslations. Thus a question obsessing the Chinese translation field comes into being: Why were so manyunfaithful translated versions accepted by the readers in the target culture?Since the emergence of"Cultural Turn", people begin to shift their attention from equivalence between thetranslated works and the original based on linguistic comparison to analysis of the translated works in differentcultures. Especially with the development of descriptive studies, translation is placed in the social and culturalcontext in which translated works were produced at the particular time. The change of perspectives results in thedeeper understanding of translation and more objective and comprehensive evaluation to translators and theirtranslated works.This thesis adopts Toury's Translation Norms Theory in the descriptive school as the theoretical foundationand sets literary translation in the third translation climax in China into the social and cultural context to bestudied. With the careful organization and analysis of all the collected prefaces and postscripts to the translatednovels, the writer divides the literary translation in the third translation climax into two stages taking NewCulture Movement as a turning point. Simultaneously, some common topics that were discussed or concerned bythe translators of the day are figured out: translation purpose, translation language, translation methods, readers'acceptability and literary comparison between the West and China. Through the individual description to each ofthe topic, the translators'choices can be seen easily, so the further discussion about how norms restrict thetranslators'choices is necessary. Finally the findings are gotten as such: (1) translators are restricted by socialand cultural norm, language norm, traditional literary norm, readers'acceptability and translators'culturalattitude at the particular time in the whole process of translation. The power of norms is changeable in thedifferent historical periods, which leads to the change of translators'choices. (2) in the different socialculturalbackground, translators need to adjust themselves to the dominant norms so that their translated versions can beaccepted in the target culture. Meanwhile, translators can shape the new norms via his translated works. (3)translators'subjectivity plays an important role in deciding whether to obey the norms or not. So, it is necessary to reevaluate the translation from the new perspective. Only in this way can we find therationality and value of any translation.The thesis consists of six chapters. In chapter one, the writer introduces the research background, definesthe scope, subject and significance of the research. Chapter two is literature reviews about the studies of literarytranslation in the third translation climax in China and introduction and application of translation norms abroadand in China. Meanwhile, the necessity of this research is pointed out. Chapter three is the theoretical foundationmainly on Toury's Translation Norms Theory. Chapter four introduces research method, the resources of prefacesand postscripts to the translated novels used as materials for the research and points out the research questions.Chapter five describes the translators'choices embodied in prefaces and postscripts to the translated novels andfurther discussion is followed. Chapter six is about the major findings, limitations and suggestions for the furtherresearch.