A Comparative Study Of Three English Versions Of Ying Ning From The Perspective Of Translation Norms Theory

This thesis makes a tentative study on the three English versions of Ying Ning under the framework of Toury’s theory of translation norms.There emerged a cultural turn in translation studies since 1970s.Many scholars transferred from the traditional linguistic perspective to the cultural perspective, proposing that translation is product of concrete socio-cultural backgrounds. Polysystem Translation School is representative theory of cultural turn in translation studies.One of its representative person, Gideon Toury, constructed his own translation norms theory on the basis of James Holmes’ and Itamar Even-Zohar’s researches as well as his own large amounts of case studies.He established three types of norms, namely, initial norms, preliminary norms and operational norms, which restrict different translation processes. Toury’s theory of translation norms makes great contributions to the translation studies and provides a more objective, broad and comprehensive theoretical framework.Ying Ning has many versions of translated texts. This paper selects three famous versions, namely, the version of Herbert A. Giles, Yang Xianyi and his wife Gladys Yang, Denis C.Mair and Victor H.Mair, to analyze how initial norms, preliminary norms and operational norms affect these three different texts. Translated text is the product of the balance of the tense between the norms in the source text and those in the target texts. Different norms affect different stages in translation and these three norms restrict various choices including the selection of source texts, the style of the translated texts and translation strategies and skills. The thesis tries to explore three different versions from macro socio-cultural level and the micro linguistic level. It is found that initial norms, preliminary norms and operational norms in the source and target culture have influence on these three English versions in different translation processes and thus produce different texts in language style, translation strategies and skills.This paper provides a new angle for the studies of Ying Ning, helps us understand the nature of translation and testify the explanatory of capability of theory of translation norms.