Three Versions Of Oscar Wilde's Fairy Tales: A Descriptive Study

DTS emerged in 1970s with Gideon Toury as its representative. The main idea of DTS is examining translation activity against the vast background of social and cultural context, which transcend the limitation of traditional translation theories. The evaluation of a translation is no longer depended on a single standard but on its real function in the target culture. Taking DTS as the theoretical foundation, three different versions of Oscar Wilde's fairy tales are brought into comparison to find their variations in different decades.Oscar Wilde is the representative of aestheticism in England. His two fairy tale collections, Happy Prince and Other Tales and The Pomegranate House, enjoy higher popularity in China than his other works. In 1909, one of the most famous one, Happy Prince, was translated by Zhou Zuoren. After that, more than one hundred versions of his fairy tales appeared in a century's time. In this thesis, we choose three versions as the research subjects:Zhou Zuoren's Anle Wangzi, Ba Jin's Kuaile Wangzi Ji, and Su Fuzhong and Zhang Min's Kuaile Wangzi. Starting with the respective social and cultural environment of the three versions, this thesis tries to draw a comparison in a certain period in order to analyze translator's choice of different strategies and the effect of readers' expectation. The analysis above is a macroscopic description of the translation activity basing on Toury's preliminary norm, initial norm and Chesterman's expectation norm. Employing Toury's description of operational norms, a microscopic study is conducted at the next step, including style, sentence structure, and word choice. In the end, a critical evaluation of the three versions is made according to its reception in the target culture. The three steps, being closely related to one another, form an organic whole and make an objective and comprehensive description of translator's activity.After the cross-epoch study on three versions of Oscar Wilde's fairy tales, the major findings can be concluded as follows:translation is a norm-governed activity; translators in different decades often choose different strategies to produce totally different products. For example, Zhou Zuoren applied Classical Chinese to his translation, while Ba Jin's language was more easy and colloquial. Because of the instability of norms, different period often has various kinds of norms. The evaluation of a text can't be totally depended on an only and still standard, but is worthy of more analysis on the social environment and expectation of readership at that time. Even under the constraints of different norms, the style of a translator that is not in contradictory to special norms can be retained as well. Although translator can make their own choice between adequacy and acceptability, their choice is still subject to special norms.