A Critique Of Two Versions Of A House On Mango Street: From The Perspective Of Toury’s Norm Theory

Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street was published in 1984 and won the Columbus American Book Award in the following year. Up to now, it has been translated into many languages and even become the text book for American middle school. There are two Chinese versions of this book: one is translated by Pan Pa in 2006, and the other is translated by Lin Weizheng in 2010. Both these two versions are very popular among the mainland and Taiwan. Until now, the studies of this book mainly focus on the cultural and feminist perspectives, while the studies about its translation is rather few. This paper devotes to compare the two versions under the guidance of the Norm Theory.In the 1980 s, based on Even Zohar’s Polysystem Theory and James S. Holmes’ translation research, Gideon Toury first put forward translational norm theory. According to Toury, the translation norms can be divided into initial norms, preliminary norms, and operational norms. Following Toury, scholars including Andre Chesterman, Theo Hermans, and Christiane Nord etc. have made unremitting efforts to fulfill and improve the norm theory. Chesterman proposed the “memes” of culture as norms. He divided norms into two categories: product norms and process norms. Hermans elaborated a lot on the nature of translation norms and proposed several significant suggestions for studying norms. Nord put forward constitutive norms and regulative norms. All these researches complement each other and form the main body of the Norm Theory.The two translated versions were compared in terms of wording, sentence order, the form, addition and omission on the level of operational norm, preliminary norm, and initial norm. It is concluded that, Lin Weizheng takes a target-oriented initial norm, and thus the operational norms tends to that of the target language. However Pan Pa employs the origin-oriented norm, and his translation strategies tend to be foreignized.