On The Three Retranslations Of Robinson Crusoe From The Perspective Of Toury’s Translaitonal Norms

As the representative work of the British writer Daniel Defoe, RobinsonCrusoe has been in China for more than one hundred years since it was firstlytranslated into Chinese in1902. Statistics shows that there are already more than50retranslated versions of Robinson Crusoe in China including versions in classicalChinese from the late Qing Dynasty to the time around the May Fourth Movement,vernacular and semi-vernacular Chinese after the May Fourth Movement to theestablishment of the People’s Republic of China and modern Chinese afterwards.Studies from various perspectives on Robinson Crusoe have been made up to now.Some are from the linguistic point of view, some are from the perspective of postcolonialism and post modernism and others are from rewriting theories.This thesis makes a systematic study on the retranslated versions from theperspective of Toury’s translational norms. The retranslated versions are divided intothree phases diachronically and one version will be chosen from each phase as arepresentative for descriptive and comparative study. By this study, the author of thisthesis hopes to find out what kind of influences the mainstream translational normsposed on the retranslations of Robinson Crusoe and provide a new vision in the studyof Robinson Crusoe’s translation in China.By analysis of the general historical, social and cultural background of the threephases from the macro level and statistical analysis of the three representativetranslated versions from the micro level, this thesis finds that the translations ofRobinson Crusoe take on a trend from acceptance to adequacy. Even though themainstream translational norms changed with the time, the translations of RobinsonCrusoe generally complied with the mainstream translational norms of the day,which is one of the reasons that make Robinson Crusoe popular in China for morethan one hundred years.