On Liu Shicong’s Prose Translation From Descriptive Translation Studies

Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) make analysis of social and cultural influence on translation by putting translation into social and cultural polysystem of target language and explain inclination of translator in the process of translation. According to DTS, the basic function of translated text is to provide target readers with information. Translation should abide by target norms on the one hand, and get accustomed to social mentality and cultural background on the other hand. This thesis will take Gideon Toury’s translation norms as core theoretical basis to analyze characteristics of Liu Shicong’s prose translation. Toury divides translation norms into three categories:preliminary norms, initial norms and operational norms. Preliminary norms cover translation policy and directness of translation. Initial norms refer to basic consideration of translator before translating, namely, translator’s inclination towards original or target text. Operational norms include matricial norms and textual-linguistic norms, factors that influence translator’s actual decision. It will be objective and extensive to find out influential factors and characteristics of Liu Shicong’s prose translation from perspective of DTS.Researches from DTS could effectively reveal characteristics and strategies which translator shows in translation under the social and cultural influence. Professor Liu Shicong has carried out teaching and practice of literary translation between English and Chinese as well as theoretical researches in this regards for several years. His translation covers essence of both Chinese and English language and culture in modern time. The analysis of putting Liu’s translation into global polysystem could reveal influential factors based on Toury’s translation norms. However, linguistic and cultural norms of the original and the target text exert influence on every stage of translation, such as translator’s choice of the original text, the translation inclination and the decision on macro and micro textual levels etc. With all these methods, a translator could make his translation received easier by target readers.The completion of Liu Shicong prose translation corpus and the application of corpus tool provides convenience and objectivity to related search, comparison and analysis. The author of this paper chose39translation articles as research objects, including13English-Chinese and26Chinese-English texts and took the electronic version as the corpus content. Based on Toury’s three translation norms, tags of corpus were made manually. And then analysis and generalization of specific items could be carried out in accordance with two levels of tags with aid of WordSmith tool.It is a novel research to analyze characteristics of Liu Shicong’s prose translation from DTS with Toury’s translation norms as the core theoretical basis. It could prove the feasibility of Toury’s translation norms in application of research on prose translation. Liu’s translation shows a better target-oriented inclination of language and culture in order to render translation with easier acceptance of target culture. In dealing with specific cultural and linguistic items, Liu adopts methods of maintaining the original flavor. Moreover, this research on Liu Shicong’s prose translation also proves the feasibility and the practice of Toury’s translation theory in certain degree.