A Study Of Ren Rongrong's Chinese Version Of Peter Pan From The Perspective Of Toury's Translational Norm Theory

In the 1980s,the famous Israeli scholar Gideon Toury put forward translational norm theory on the basis of polysystem theory.He pointed out that translation was an activity restricted by norms and that translators' macro choice before translation and their various decisions in the process of translation would surely be influenced by their social culture and other factors.Accordingly,he distinguished three important translational norms:preliminary norms,initial norms and operational norms.These norms run through the whole process of translation and provide a good theoretical perspective for translation studies.Peter Pan is a masterpiece of the English writer James Barrie and one of the most influential works in the history of English children's literature.This novel profoundly reveals the significance of the theme of growing-up by telling various adventurous stories that the protagonist Peter Pan and some other children have experienced on the Neverland.It is very popular with readers,especially with child readers.And it was first translated into Chinese in 1929.After that,there appeared quite a few other translated versions.Among them,Ren Rongrong's version is a highly-praised excellent one with a large number of readers.This thesis intends to use Toury's translational norm theory to analyze and explore Ren Rongrong's Chinese version of Peter Pan.Based on these three norms,the thesis makes a descriptive analysis of Ren Rongrong's Chinese version of Peter Pan,exploring his translation strategies and methods,and trying to find out the reasons for the success of his translation.It first discusses the factors influencing Ren Rongrong's choice of the original text and translation strategies from the perspective of preliminary norms and initial norms.Then it makes a detailed analysis of his translation at the linguistic and cultural levels from the perspective of operational norms.The success of Ren Rongrong's translation of Peter Pan is due to the fact that he is influenced by translational norms at all stages of his translation and thereby makes appropriate choices.First,in the preliminary norms,his choice of the original text is influenced by the social background and his personal preference.Then,in the initial norms,his choice of translation strategies is influenced by his own translation thoughts and purposes as well as the text type and the target readers,revealing his cultural tendency in the translation.At the linguistic level,considering the cognitive features of child readers,Ren Rongrong adopts domestication as the main translation strategy and foreignization as a supplementary one,achieving the "acceptability" of his translation.At the cultural level,in order to let child readers enrich their knowledge,he adopts foreignization as the main translation strategy and domestication as a supplementary one,achieving the "adequacy" of his translation.The operational norms in his translation reflect the dual effects of both the source and the target norms.At the linguistic level,Ren Rongrong is mainly influenced by the target norms.Apart from his tendency to divide the original long complex sentences into short ones and reproduce the rhetoric devices of the original text with fluent and idiomatic target language,he tends to use onomatopoetic words,reduplicated words,colloquial words and four-character phrases so that his translation is easy for the target readers to understand and accept.At the cultural level,he is mainly influenced by the original norms and adopts the methods of preservation and annotation supplemented by adaptation to translate the cultural knowledge of the original language,realizing effective cross-cultural communication through translation.From the above,we can conclude that translators' choice and handling of specific texts are the result of interaction of various factors in a specific period.