A Comparative Study Of The Chinese Versions Of Pride And Prejudice From The Perspective Of Toury’s Translation Norm Theory

In the1980s and1990s, Gideon Toury inherited and developed Even-Zohar’s Polysystem Theory and James Holmes’s Translational Studies theories, formulating the theory of translational norms. His theory contains three parts:the importance of descriptive study in translation, the target-oriented research method, and the study of translational norms. The third part is the core of his theory and covers the first and second parts. The aim of his study is not to make rules for translation but to find the norms followed by translators in translation practice, and to build the complete system of constraining factors in translation. His theory has broken through the faithfulness and equivalence standards and prescriptive characteristic of traditional translation theories, broadening the concept of translation and providing a new and more complete perspective for people to consider and explain translational phenomena. Under the background of society and culture, he investigated the process of translation and divided the constraining factors into three types which form the parts of translational norms:preliminary norms, initial norms and operational norms. The first two types of norms influence the production of translation on a macro level, and the last one forms the micro-level influence. Preliminary norms which can affect the selection of source text include the translational policy of a certain times of a certain culture, such as types of works, writers and schools, and the directness of translation-whether the target readers can accept indirect translation from a third language. Initial norms decide the whole tendency of translation by following the source language and culture’s norms or abiding by the target language and culture’s norms. Operational norms affect the whole structure of the text, the choice of words and the organization of the linguistic material.This paper starts from Toury’s translational norms, studies and compares the Chinese versions of Pride and Prejudice by Wang Keyi and Sun Zhili respectively, probes into the influence of translational norms on the production of translation from aspects of selection of source text to choice of translational policies to adoption of specific translating strategies and techniques. Translation is a process of making choices between two sets of norms, namely source language cultural norms and target language cultural norms. With the introduction and the application of Toury’s translational norms, we can conduct translation research from a new perspective, deepen our understanding of the nature of translation and analyze translation practice, and can testify the rationality and explanatory power of the theory of translational norms.This thesis is divided into five chapters.The first chapter is an introduction which briefly introduces the main points of the thesis, the methodology, the purpose of the thesis and the significance of analyzing the versions from the perspective of translational norms. The second chapter is literature review. It introduces Jane Austen, the author of Pride and Prejudice and domestic research on Chinese versions of the novel. The third chapter introduces Toury’s theory of translational norms. The fourth chapter is the analysis of the two translational versions and many examples are extracted from the target texts to analyze the influence of translational norms on translation practice. The fifth chapter concludes the whole paper as follows:Toury’s translational norms have great influence on the production of translational works. And the weakness of this paper is pointed out.