| Translation is a communication activity among different languages and cultures. As a unique form of translation, self-translation refers to translation activities that the author of an original text translates the text into another language by him/herself. In translation studies, study on self-translation is a relatively new field and is limited in its scale as well as the number of researchers involved. Among authors that have engaged in translation practice, Eileen Chang is a representative in China. As a writer who is proficient both in Chinese and in English, she conducted two-way translation of her own works between Chinese and English. So an analysis on Eileen Chang’s self-translation is of significance to study on not only Eileen Chang’s translation, but also self-translation as a whole. Study on Eileen Chang’s writing began as early as 1940 s, while till 1980 s, scholars started to pay attention to Eileen Chang as a translator. Compared with studies on her writing, research on her translation is by no means sufficient and complete.Based on the descriptive translation studies method, the Israeli scholar Gideon Toury developed a norms theory for translation studies. According to Toury, translation as a social-cultural activity is governed by three types of norms: the initial norm, preliminary norms and operational norms. Such norms cover not only social culture context of translation, but also the group of people that are related to translation. On the one hand, the three types of norms affect translation from aspects including source text selection, general translation preference and specific translation methods. On the other hand, analysis of translation products will in turn reveal the decision-making process of a translator and thus reconstruct norms behind such translation activities. Under the norms theory, regularities of translation events under certain social and historical background can be reconstructed and influencing factors can be explored.Under the guidance of the norms theory of Gideon Toury, this thesis is to take Eileen Chang’s self-translation of Jin Suo Ji, one of the representative works of Eileen Chang, as an example, trying to explore norms that influence Eileen Chang’s self-translation of Jin Suo Ji and figure out translation strategies used. Firstly, as for the initial norm, upon the study on translation purpose and Eileen Chang’s views toward translation, it is concluded that Eileen Chang tries to achieve a balance between adequacy and acceptability with adequacy being the primary concern. Secondly, for preliminary norms, it is the translation task commissioner as well as Eileen Chang, the author-translator, that select the translation text while the bilingual proficiency of the author-translator as well as the lack of a third-language edition of the original work determine the directness of translation. Thirdly, for operational norms, upon the case study on Jin Suo Ji, it is found out when dealing with translation problems, Eileen Chang adopts a combination of various translation methods, among which literal translation is the most frequently used one. It proves that operational norms are in conformity with the initial and preliminary norms. Under the influence of translational norms, strategies in Eileen Chang’s self-translation of Jin Suo Ji include literal translation, liberal translation, zero translation, annotation, explanatory translation and borrowing.As this thesis focuses only on one particular self-translated work of Eileen Chang, there are certain limitations. For further study, it is suggested that more works, including her English-to-Chinese self-translation works should be included so as to provide a more comprehensive conclusion on the relationship between norms and translation strategies in Eileen Chang’s self-translation. |
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