A Study Of Two Chinese Versions Of Bag Of Bones From The Perspective Of Toury’s Translation Norms

As a representative of descriptive study, Toury puts forward three translation norms in Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond, namely initial norms, preliminary norms and operational norms. He points out that translation is a norm-governed activity which affected by norms in every phase of translation activities and textual and extratexual sources are two major sources for a reconstruction of translational norms.In this thesis, Stephen King’s Bag of Bones are chosen as the research text, and the research are conducted under the theory of Toury’s translation norms. The author tries to reconstruct the translation norms from textual and extratextual sources. It first presents the research background and motivation. Also in this part, Toury’s Norm Theory, the theoretical framework, is discussed regarding to its studies and application in translation activities. In the second part, it introduces the history of Description Translation Studies, including the development of Polysystem Theory and Translational norms. And then the introduction of Toury’s Norm Theory is also included in this part. The third part is a brief introduction of King and his works. The fourth part is the most important part, which contains the descriptive studies of the two versions of Bag of Bones from the perspectives of initial norms, preliminary norms and operational norms. The author tries to reconstruct the translational norms from textual and extratextual sources, for example, the choice of original text, the translator, and the strategies that are employed and so on to study the translation norms that exert their influence during the translation process. The last part is the conclusion which provides some applicable suggestion for translation activities.Different from the prescriptive translation studies, the aim of this thesis is not to judge which translation version is better, but to discover how the norms exert their influence in the whole translation process. Besides accumulating new data to purport Toury’s translation norms, it also provides some translation methods and strategies that both apply to the mainland and Taiwan.