On Rickshaw Boy Translated By Evan King: A Norms' Perspective

Luotuo Xiangzi is the most favorite novel of Lao She who regarded his masterpiece as a touchstone for his life-long writing career (老舍, 1945). Bearing much effort and deliberation of its author, the novel won him a good reputation soon after it hit the market, and was immediately translated into the West. The English version, was translated by Evan King, an American translator, in 1945, for which Lao She left his remark with"not bad"1(老舍, 1990:203). However, much alteration by deletion and adaptation was found to be against the traditional idea about what a good translation should be. Just like what Toury, the famous scholar, has said that a theory would be problematic if it was not applicable everywhere in the translation activities. (Toury, 1980: 62) It remains a question how to evaluate such a translation which is seemingly going away from the original text but receiving a good reputation?In the 1970s, the western translation studies put forward the descriptive approaches, which proposed to describe, analyze, and explain translation phenomena objectively rather than valuing it subjectively with some existed rules. Toury is one of the pioneers who adopted descriptive approaches to examine translational phenomena. This thesis will apply Toury's norm theory to the study on King's English version of Luotuo Xiangzi, Rickshaw Boy. Firstly,it will describe what the translation is like, and what deviations have been made in this translation; And then by comparing with the original text, this thesis will seek the deep-seated reasons from the expansive social environment to find out what norms has taken a part in shaping this translation, and how they joined into together to reach a resultant force that brought the translation into what it ultimately was.Chapter One is introduction, which introduces the main questions this thesis will tackle with and the structure of this thesis; Chapter Two is literature review, in which Lao She, Luotuo Xiangzi, and the evolution of its publishing and translation will be given a brief sketch of; Chapter Three is theory basis, in which we will review the development history of translation studies in the West, with the descriptive approaches being its focus. Then the notion of norm, and its study in translation theory, particularly Toury's norm theory will be given a detailed explanation, where the methodology on how to make a descriptive study on translation and norms will be suggested; Chapter Four is the main part of this thesis. In this chapter, Rickshaw Boy translated by Evan King will be given a descriptive study compared with its original text, Luotuo Xiangzi according to the three norms which Toury has distinguished, with evidences drawn from text and extra-text being presented. The last chapter is conclusion, where study results, study meaning, and the limitation of this study are addressed.