Study On The English Version Of Mr.Ma And Son From The Perspective Of Toury’s Norms Theory

From1924to1929, Lao She was a lecturer in the Chinese section of the School of Oriental Studies inLondon, during which period, he read a lot of English literary works, and began to write. During his fiveyears’ stay in England, Lao She wrote three novels, Old Zhang’s Philosophy, What Mr. Zhao Says and Mr.Ma and Son, which established his position in modern Chinese literature. Mr. Ma and Son was the lastnovel Lao She wrote in London. It is special because it is the only work that describes Chinese people inthe background of English culture among Lao She’s works and in the history of Chinese literature. Mr. Maand Son enjoyed a great popularity because of the original subject, successful characters and the simplelanguage. Three English versions appeared successively after the novel was published. However, for a longtime, there were not sufficient studies on Mr. Ma and Son, let alone its English versions. Taking Israelischolar Gideon Toury’s theory of translational norms as the theoretical foundation, this thesis aims atresearching one of the three English versions.Based on a great deal of case study, Gideon Toury’s theory was formulated in1980s and constructed amulti-dimensional framework for translation studies. Toury claims that translation is a norm-governedactivity. He divides the translational norms into three categories: initial norms, preliminary norms andoperational norms. Initial norms refer to the overall choice on the inclination to the source cultural norms orthe target cultural norms. Preliminary norms including translation policy and the directness of translationare the macro factors constraining the translator before the translating behaviour. While operational norms,including matricial norms and textual-linguistic norms, can be regarded as the micro ones affecting thetranslation of the source text.This thesis means to describe the existing translation detailedly and objectively through analysing themanipulation of the source-text selection by preliminary norms, the manipulation of the translator’s overallchoice on the inclination to the adequacy or the acceptability, and the manipulation of the strategiesselection by operational norms.