A Study Of Xu Zhimo's Poetry Translation Under Toury's Descriptive Translational Norm Theory

Xu Zhimo is one of the distinguished poets of the 1920s, and he is also one of the most important translators of poetry at his time. In fact, Guo Zhuzhang(郭著章1999) argued in his Researches into Famous Translators that Xu Zhimo is entitled as one of the sixteen major translators at the beginning of the twentieth century. Xu Zhimo's translations enrich his own creative thinking and provide essential fresh blood and nutrition for the New Poetry in China.However, Xu Zhimo has not got much concern as a poetry translator since his time. There are countless researches into Xu Zhimo's poetry writing activities but quite a few about his translation activities. Moreover, the majority studies about Zhimo's translation activities 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 Xu'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 Xu's translations. Gideon Toury is one of the most prominent figures in this field, whose translation theory is based on hypothesis that translation is a norm-governed activity. He extended"norm"from a prescriptive concept into a descriptive one. According to him, translation, governed by norms, is not a static concept, but rather changeable as the norms change. As a"fact"in the culture, translation is restricted by many variables, such as those of culture, society and history, etc. Toury's translational norms theory is target-oriented, so in order to be accepted by the target language system, a translator should adapt himself to norms and make reasonable translation strategies , which stressed the translator's subjectivity.Taking Toury's translational norms theory as its theoretical framework, this thesis carries out an examination of Xu's translations in their social and cultural contexts. The present author analyzes Xu's translations from three different levels: initial norm, preliminary norms and operational norms to reveal the certain historical and cultural factors which affect Xu Zhimo's poetry translation and the decisive role Xu Zhimo play in choosing certain translation strategies to give Xu Zhimo, the poet translator, a much more comprehensive and fairer look.