Study On Translators’ Subjectivity From The Perspective Of Toury’s Translation Norms

Gideon Toury,one of the representatives of Descriptive Translation Study,put forward Translational Norms Theory based on Evan Zohar’s Polysystem and Holmes descriptive methods,which furthers the cultural turn of translation studies.He classified translational norms into three types:preliminary norms,operational norms and initial norms,.indicating translator’s choice is influenced by various norms.However,there is a limitation of Toury’s research in that his researches adopt one-way method,analyzing the extra-textual factors on translators and further ignoring the influence of translator’s personal subjectivity and creativity in translation works.So the author tends to put translator’s subjectivity under the framework of Toury’s Translation Norm Theory to reveal how translator’s subjectivity is reflected during the process of translating.Xixiang Ji is one of the greatest Chinese classics in China,exerting great influences in later Chinese literature.However,its genre Zaju in Yuan Dynasty had been ignored by late scholars.So the work of Xixiang Ji is selected here as a research object,with two English translations,one by Chinese translator Xu Yuanchong,another a co-translated version by American and Dutch translators Stephan H.West and Wilt L.Idema.The thesis makes a contrastive analysis about the translator’s subjectivity of two English translations reflected during translation process from Toury’s three translational norms.The whole thesis is based on contrastive and descriptive methods to discuss two questions:(1)Which factors have influenced three translators’selection of translation works from the perspective of Toury’s Preliminary Norms?How did three translators translate under Operational Norms and what are their overall translation tendencies?(2)How have three translators exerted subjectivity to achieve their translation purposes during the process of translation?The thesis comes to a conclusion that the selection of translation works is mainly affected by two factors:the social-cultural factors and translator’s individual factors.In 1970s,more and more Western researches shifted their focus on exotic cultures.At the same time,with the prosperity of China’s economy,Chinese government actively carried out "going out"Strategy.Therefore it makes possible for the translation of Chinese ancient drama Xixiang Ji.Personally,West and Idema are famous sinologists and devote most their time to the researches of Chinese drama especially ancient drama,while Xu is one of the greatest translators in modern China and he tried to translate all kinds of Chinese literature genre into the world.As for the macro-level of translation,Xu’s translation is a kind of Chinese-English bilingual version with Chinese at one page and English at another page,while West and Idema added an Introduction to introduce the work and offered some background information to the target language readers.They translated according to different editions of the original work.As for the micro-level of translation,Xu adopted translation strategy of domestication in translating cultural proper nouns while West and Idema employed translation strategy of foreignization.As for Qupai,all of three translators took foreignization while the percentage of West and Idema is higher than that of Xu.What’s more,Xu’s version is rhymed poetic style striving to achieve rhyme as in the original work while West and Idema tried to keep the meaning faithful to the source text with prose style.The characteristics of translator’s subjectivity is revealed mainly in two aspects:translator’s purposivity and translator’s creativity.Xu’s purposivity is reflected in that except his purpose of introducing Chinese cultures,he is a translation theorist as well and has his own translation theories like "Three Beauties" and:"Three Transformation".However.West and Idema’s purposivity is revealed that their main purpose is to let target readers approach to the Chinese original text and they have no special translation theory.Translator’s purposivity is closely related to translator’s creativity.Xu’s creativity lies in that he adopted five translation methods in translating cultural proper nouns and Qupai to achieve his purpose.As for rhyme,he tried to retain the original rhyme.So the stylistic feature of his translation is rhymed translation.While West and Idema’s purposivity is revealed in that he chose six translation methods to translate cultural proper nouns and Qupai.As for rhyme,they paid more attention on reproducing the meaning.Therefore their translation is prosaic translation.