On Ling Biru’s Chinese Version Of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture Of Dorian Gray: A Perspective Of Translation Norms

As Oscar Wilde’s representative work of Aestheticism, The Picture of DorianGray was attacked from all over the world as soon as it came out. However, itcharmed a large number of people with its own peculiarity as well. Since the early1920s, there have been three translation trends of Wilde. So far, there are about9versions of The Picture of Dorian Gray in China and Ling Biru’s version of1936wasthe earliest one that can be found. In China, most of the researchers prefer to study theoriginal work of Wilde from the perspective of aesthetic appreciation. Based on thethree norms of DTS, this thesis analyzes Ling’s Chinese version. Norms often areshaping up against the interaction of different factors such as: culture, politics andideology, etc.. Moreover, it varies with time and locations. In Toury’s opinion, theend-product of any translation is controlled by norms. The traditional criterion offaithfulness should not be the only standard to evaluate the quality of translation. Thispaper intends to explore causes of the production and peculiar features of Ling’sChinese version through the descriptive method so as to find out the influence of thetranslation norms of that particular age, disregarding the question of the quality oftranslation.As a social and cultural activity, translation is inevitably constrained by certaincultural norms. Moreover, a translator will take certain norms either in the sourcesociety or in target society into consideration, which are translation norms.This thesis attempts to interpret Ling’s version under the guidance of Initialnorms, Preliminary norms and Operational norms. According to Initial norms, thetranslator needs to make a decision between two different languages and cultures:either the source culture or the target culture. Under the guidance of Preliminarynorms, this paper gives a detailed analysis of the cultural background, the influence ofthe ongoing trends of translation and translation strategy of that age on the process ofMr. Ling’s translation. In accordance with Operational norms, this thesis discusses the actual translation method and the factors of word choice, rhetoric devices andsentence structure. Mr. Ling chose to conform to the mainstream of translation normsat that time to deal with the original work, adopting the strategy of foreignization toachieve the adequacy of the source culture.