Three Versions Of Gone With The Wind: A Translation Norm Perspective

On the base of James S. Holmes's descriptive translation study, Gideon Toury extended the scope of translation study into target language culture to trace the translational norms of the translated works with lots of case studies, which made descriptive approach a complete and autonomic empirical science. Under the guidance of Toury's translational norms, this thesis has a reconstruction of the norms in three different versions of Gone with the Wind. This study divides into two processes:one is the reconstruction of the preliminary norms from the aspect of target language culture; the other is the reconstruction of the operational norms from the diachronic change of language use.The conclusions of the reconstruction are as follows:The domestication of Fu Donghua's version represented a deviation of the dominant foreignization and the recurrence of the literature's "entertainment" function, which was mostly under the influence of traditional Chinese poetics; Chen Liangting et al's version adopted the "original-centered" translation strategy, which was mostly affected by the opened social consciousness and the readers'foreignness expectation; the domestication of the emotional words reflects that the openness of Chinese people's emotion and psyche relatively lagged behind the social ideology because of the influence of traditional Chinese culture; Li Meihua's version reflected the literary request of poetics from the adjusting of the Europeanized syntax as well as the words choice, and the new expressions of Li's version reflected that language was changing with the development of the time.From the analysis of the preliminary norms of the three versions we can find out that poetics and social ideology influenced the representation of the translated works with different strengths and way of action in different periods. Basically, the influence of poetics was more radical, stable and continuous, while the influence of social ideology was mostly from the "upper level" with the characteristic of temporary and uncertainty. Based on this foundation, this study tries to explain the reason why Even-Zohar's poly system theory couldn't available in many periods of China, that's because the profound influence of poetics made the literary representation lagging behind the development of social ideology, and the translation strategy is dated to the mainstream. And the influence of the poetics to the translator and readers' horizon of expectation made the domestication more frequently used than foreignization in Chinese literature translation.From the reconstruction of the operational norms, this thesis makes a comparison on the statistics of the language use of the three versions based on corpus building. Statistics shows that it is quite different in the language use of the three versions from the aspects of type/token ratio, average word length and average sentence length, which reflects that Chinese is changing with the time. The statistics also provides the proof for the influence of poetics and social ideology on translation language we have discussed above.