A Comparative Study Of Two Chinese Versions Of The Thorn Birds From The Perspective Of Toury’s Norm Theory

The Thorn Birds is a saga novel by Collen McCullough and praised as the "Gone with the Wind" of Australia. In China, there are two Chinese versions:Xiao Ming, Chen Mingjin’s version published in 1983 and Zeng Hu’s version published in 1990. There are many researches on this novel domestically and abroad, mainly focused on characters and their inner world, image and symbols within, vision of love, comparative literature, feminism and religion. Research from the angle of translation is scarce.The Israeli scholar Gideon Toury puts forward three kinds of norms in translation process. The selection of the source text, the translation strategy beforehand and the translation skills during the whole process are all framed and influenced by various, social-cultural factors and norms.Though analyzing the two versions from the perspective of Toury’s translational norms-initial norms, preliminary norms and operational norms, the purpose of study in this thesis is to enrich the existing research results concerning the translations of McCullough’s novel The Thorn Birds from a descriptive angle and to make certain contributions in providing a more thorough and comprehensive understanding of the translation phenomena to people. The discussing of this thesis is more focus on the different translation strategy selection of the two versions, different translation policy, different translation for the same word, the amount of footnotes, omission of paragraphs and so on.More attention was paid to the studies of the original The Thorn Birds, rather than their Chinese versions, leaving quite a lot issues for us to explore. This thesis provides a new perspective for the research of The Thorn Birds. It aims to enhance the understanding and study of these two versions and the Toury’s translational norms, providing certain reference for literary translation afterwards.