A Study On Hu Zhongchi’s Translation Of Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth In Light Of Toury’s Translation Norm Theory

This thesis attempts to explain the popularity of Hu Zhongchi’s translation of The Good Earth from Gideon Toury’s translation norm theory and discover norms behind Hu’s translation at that particular historical period.Translation is more than transformation at linguistic level but a social activity. Toury’s translation norm theory provides a descriptive approach to explain translation from both social and linguistic perspective. However, even now very little literature focuses on Hu Zhongchi’s translation of The Good Earth and no existing literature explains Hu’s success from Toury’s translation norm theory to the author’s literature retrieval. Consequently, this thesis attempts to do this research to explore norms behind Hu’s translation and explain Hu’s success.The research concludes that historical conditions, political factors and Hu Zhongchi’s own translation tendency have led to the selection of The Good Earth as the source text. The relative young position of Chinese realism in the whole literary system and readers’ expectation of knowing more of the details in the source text have altogether led to the dominant quality of adequacy over acceptability in the translation. Based on the above analysis, it is concluded that the following two reasons have mainly contributed to the translation’s success: 1) Choosing The Good Earth as the source text caters to the dominant ideology and meets society’s and market’s demand; 2) At linguistic level the translator’s translational decisions not only reserve the writing style of the source text but also make the target text easy to understand, which ensure the translation’s readability.