Research On Evan King's Rickshaw Boy From The Perspective Of Gideon Toury's Translational Norm Theory

This thesis conducts a study on Evan King's Rickshaw Boy, the first English version of Luotuo Xiangzi,from the perspective of descriptive translation study (DTS) in an attempt to explore the reasons of thisunfaithful translation's success, and provide a convincing example for the applicability of Gideon Toury'stranslational norm theory on describing translator's behavior.Translation is not only a transformation between languages, but also a type of social activity whichclosely links with social, cultural and historical factors. Therefore, any success of translation can not onlybe explained at the linguistic level. Now some scholars begin focusing on the influence of cultural elements,and attempt to find out the reasons of King's success, nonetheless, none of them studies King's versionfrom the perspective of Toury's translational norm theory. However, from this perspective, King's successmay be revealed through analyzing the translating process of this version, including the translator's choiceof original text, the translation strategies in translating and the changes.According to three translational norms, this study focuses on the translating process and carries out acontrastive analysis on King's choice of Luotuo Xiangzi from three aspects—the translator's choice of thesource text, the influences of translator's translation strategies on the acceptance of this version, and thetranslator's adaptations of the original text by comparing the translated version with the original one. Thisstudy can help to reveal the influence of socio-cultural factors on the translator's series of choices in thetranslating process, thus to demonstrate the success of King's version is not accidental, but closely relatedto the social-cultural norms which are decided by American background of that time.Based on the analysis, we draw a conclusion that the translator's choices in translating process areinfluenced by many factors that finally affect the translation product. Additionally, this research proves theapplicability of translational norm theory to explain translation phenomenon.