A Comparative Study On The Two Chinese Versions Of The Great Gatsby From The Perspective Of Toury’s Norm Theory

As one of the representatives of "Jazz Age" and the "Lost Generation", The Great Gats by has become a popular novel of American literature welcomed by Chinese readers since it was first introduced into China. There have been more than 30 Chinese versions of The Great Gatsby which show its academic value to some degree. Among them, George Kao’s version got first published in Hong Kong by World Today Press in 1971 and made its first debut in mainland China by Shanghai SDX Joint Publishing Company in 2013. George Kao’s version was warmly welcomed by readers in Hong Kong and Taiwan and still remains the classical translation after several reissues. The latest Chinese version of The Great Gatsby was translated by Li Jihong, a translator born after 1980. The version came out at the right time of the reshooting and screening of the adapted movie of The Great Gatsby, catering to modern readers’requirement with a high level of readability. The two versions were created under different periods with their different features and marks of time. It is in view of this that the two versions are selected in the present thesis as the subject of the study. Taking Toury’s translational norm theory as the theoretical basis, the present paper attempts to make an in-depth research on the two versions from the angles of preliminary norms, initial norms and operational norms with the aim of analyzing the features of the times and linguistic differences under different translational environments as well as the two translators’different choices.The research reveals that two Chinese versions present different features under the influence of the three translational norms. Under the influence of preliminary norms, the socio-cultural background of George Kao’s was much more complicated than Li Jihong’s due to internal and international factors and the two translators accepted the translation task for different reasons:For George Kao, it was under the requirement and invitation of World Today Press, and because of his personal preference and shared memory in the 1920s; Li Jihong cooperated with GUOMAI Culture & Media Company Ltd and Tianjin People’s Press to translate a series of classical literary works in order to satisfy modern readers’needs for high-quality translations. Under the influence of initial norms, the overall translation strategy for George Kao’s version is to domestication featured by acceptability, while for Li Jihong’s, it is foreignization featured by adequacy. Under the influence of operational norms, for matricial norms, Li Jihong’s version presents many annotations at the end of the Chinese version, while George Kao’s version doesn’t; at the textual-linguistic norms, George Kao’s choice of words is the combination of ancient and modern Chinese, while Li Jihong’s is much more readable for modern readers. Both of them also differ from each other in handling of sentences and treatment of rhetorical features, but they both attempt to reproduce the stylistic and rhetorical features of the original text.