On Yang Bin’s And Sun Zhili’s Translations Of Pride And Prejudice

As one of the classic novels of Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice has been accepted by a large number of readers because of its vivid co nversation, sarcastic language and interesting plot. There are m ore than 10 Chinese transl ated versions of the novel, am ong which Sun Zhili’s version is m ost widely accepted by readers. However, although Yang Bin is the first Chinese translator of Pride and Prejudice, her version hasn’ t drawn much attention up till now.In the 1980 s, descriptive tran slation studies flourished, representing the trend of the development of translation th eories. Following this trend, Gideon Toury puts forward his norms theory. Toury holds that translation is a norm-governed activity with cultural significance. He m ainly illustrates three groups of norm s in th e translation, nam ely, initial norms, preliminary norms, operational norm s and the relations among them. Toury’s translation norms can offer us a chance to systematically study translators and their translation activities in a certain historical background. Meanwhile, it can also provide a new perspective to explore social, cultural an d political factors exerting infl uence on translators and their translated versions.This thesis makes analysis of two Chinese translated versions of Pride and Prejudice by Yang Bin and Sun Zhili f rom the perspec tive of Toury’s norms theory to f ind out the similarities and differences and the reasons behind them. Initial norms standardize the choice of source norms and target norms. For Yang Bin, she subjects herself to the tar get language and culture to achiev e acceptability, while fo r Sun Zhili’ s translated version, it is source-oriented reinforce adequate translation. No matter source-oriented or target-oriented, initial norms determine the whole translation process. As to trans lation policies or detailed translation strategies, Yang Bin and Sun Zhili have d ifferent preliminary norms and operational norms. Because of the lim itation of culture and social si tuation, Yang mainly adopts domestication translation to m ake the text easy to understand, while Sun adopts foreignization translation in order to fully convey the social and cultural features of the source text following the historical trend of Chinese development.The aim of the analysis and comparison of the two Chinese versions in this thes is is not to find a prescriptive rule of universal applicat ion, but to explore the inf luence of translation norms on transla tion activities and translated works. It may enrich the existing research concerning the translation of Pride and Prejudice from a descriptive aspect. Through the analysis, it is concluded that due to the di fferences in social and cultural backgrounds, translators abide by dif ferent translation norms and apply dif ferent translation policies and strategies, although they fully respect of the target-culture norms.