A Study On The English Versions Of Chin P’ing Mei --from The Perspective Of Chesterman’s Translation Norms

In the 1970s, inspired by the Polysystem Theory, Gideon Toury tried to apply translation norm theory in the Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS). Through analyzing the similar texts from the perspective of literary genre, literary periods, translators, etc, Toury made descriptive generalizations about the translated works.Andrew Chesterman inherited and developed Toury’s norm theory. On the basis of which, he put forward the expectancy norms (product norms) and professional norms. The latter is subdivided into accountability norms, communication norms and relation norms. Overall, Chesterman’s norm theory has made great contributions to translation studies and greatly promoted the "cultural turn" in translation studies.Along with the second English version of Chin P’ing Mei’s last volume published in 2013, studies on the two versions have been on a rise. However, data collected from CNKI and Baidu as well as Google have shown that no scholars so far have conducted researches on the two English versions of Chin P’ing Mei from the perspective of Norm Theory yet.So this thesis tries to do a comparative study of the two English versions of Chin P’ing Mei based on the framework of Chesterman’s translation norms theory. In this thesis, a large number of specific examples have been selected to make comparisons between the original text and the two English versions, aiming to explore the following questions:1) if the Egerton’s version and Roy’s version adopted different translation strategies in different historical times? 2) What is the reason about the difference? 3) Which translation norms the two translators chose respectively and what kind of translation effects they had achieved? 4) What inspiration can we gain for literary translating?This thesis consists five parts. The first part deals with the research background, research significance and research methodology. The second part is literature review. The third part gives a description of the framework of Chesterman’s Norm Theory. The fourth part is the core chapter of the whole thesis in which twelve specific aspects are discussed on the basis of the framework of Chesterman’s Norm Theory. The last part is the conclusion.