A Study Of The Chinese Translation Of Ulysses By Jin Di Based On The Theory Of Translation Norms By Gideon Toury

In 1922, Ulysses a long novel by James Joyce, was first published. After its first publication, it soon became the focus of the western literary world. As the representative of the stream-of-consciousness novels, Ulysses has been selected as one of the top 100 English novels in the 20 th century. In China, there are two complete and well-known translations of Ulysses:one is by Jin Di and the other is by Xiao Qian and Wen Jieruo. Jin Di’s excellent translation is greatly faithful to the original both in terms of language and style. Therefore, the present thesis tries to make a study of Jin’s translation of Ulysses based on the theory of translation norms put froward by Gideon Toury which tries to describe the translation process and figure out the norms the translator has complied with in his or her translation instead of establishing a series of principles to constrain translators.The thesis consists of five chapters. In chapter I, the author gives an introduction to the research object, research background, research methodology, significance of the present study and the thesis structure. Previous studies including previous studies of the translation, the theory and other translations based on the theory of translation norms are reviewed in Chapter II. In Chapter III, the core concept of translation norms and its classification are explained in detail. As the main body of the paper, Chapter IV is employed to carry out analysis on the translation from the three norms put forward by Gideon Toury and examples are also given for demonstration. The last chapter is the conclusion.According to the present study, in the translation process of Ulysses, in addition to subjective factors, Jin Di is inevitably influenced by various social-cultural factors. In addition to his own interest in the marvelous work, Jin’s choice of Ulysses is also decided by the social context in the 1980 s and 1990 s in China when China began to embrace new thoughts from the western world. In his translation, Jin tried to be faithful to the original under the guidance of “equivalent effect theory” and his faithfulness can be obviously seen in the matricial and textual-linguistic operations.