A Comparative Study Of The Two Chinese Versions Of Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone : The Perspective Of Translation Norms

Translation norms vary with time and place, which can greatly influence translated texts. The different translations of Harry Potter and the Philosopher‘s Stone in Mainland(translated by Su Nong from People‘s Literature Publishing House) and Chinese Taiwan(translated by Peng Chien-wen, published by Crown Publishing House) will be a good example to show that. Since 2000, the year when the translated book was published in China for the first time, it has been reprinted for many times and placed on the top of the bestsellers for quite a long time, which starts the translating climax for the western fantasy novels of the same kind. As far as the comparative study of these two versions is concerned, most researchers study and explain the differences from the perspective of functional equivalence and skopos theory based on some typical examples, few discussed the influence of translation norms on translated works. Based on the description of translation norms behind these two Chinese versions, analyzing the influence of translation norms on translators, this thesis intends to reveal the specific manifestations of translation norms‘ influence on translated works with the help of some corpus tools and statistic software.Firstly, based on the previous studies on translation norms in Mainland and Taiwan, this thesis simply draws the translation norms of that particular time and place through descriptive methods. And then, combined with the relevant paratexts(the prefaces, some interviews about these translators and the e-mail exchanges between the researcher and the translators), the researcher has figured out the translation norms these translators conform to. Furthermore, the specific manifestations of translation norms‘ influence on translated works have been discussed.The influence of the expectancy norms: target readers‘ expectations to certain translated text influence the translators. Compared with the readership(children) of Taiwan version, Mainland version has even broader readers, including grown-ups, who wish the translated work could reveal the original work on real level. While children readers of Taiwan version wish to see the imaginable magic world. The translator in Mainland conforms to more generous readers-oriented expectancy norms, the diction of her translation is more rigorous, and more foreignized translation. While the translator in Taiwan conforms to children readers-oriented expectancy norms, her translation tends to be more vivid. With the help of some corpus searching tools, this thesis describes and analyzes their differences from lexical(lexical density and the translator‘s choice of words) and syntactic level(sentence-final particles and hypotactic level). As for lexical density, Peng‘s version is a little bit higher than that of Su Nong‘s version, and when it comes to the choices of words, more vivid words lie in Peng‘s translation; for sentence-final particles, Su Nong‘s version is lower both in quantity and types than Peng‘s version, but with higher hypotactic level which means foreignization in syntax.The influence of professional norms, which can be further divided into accountability norm, communication norm and relation norm: Su Nong conforms to ST-oriented accountability norm, which makes the Mainland version tend to be more adequate while Peng‘s is more acceptable based on TT-oriented accountability norm. Under the influence of communication norms, Su Nong mostly uses semantic strategies based on meaning-oriented communication norm whereas Peng adopts more pragmatic strategies according to message-oriented communication norm to achieve ―optimal communication‖. In accordance with relation norm‘s ―optimal similarity‖, Su Nong conforms to meaning conveying-oriented relation norm, whose translation tends to be semantic similarity, while stylistic similarity lies in Peng‘s translation due to conforming to style-oriented relation norm.Because of conforming to different translation norms, different translations will definitely be come out. Translation is inevitably the product of the time and society. Translation norms, as a research perspective, will help people understand the different translations better. Corpus-based multiversion analysis can help make up the shortcomings of traditional translation analysis, which can objectively describe and analyze the translated text on macro level.