On The Differences Of Two Translations Of Tales By Edgar Allan Poe:From The Perspective Of Operational Norms

Edgar Allen Poe was one of the most famous writers in American history.Now there are many different Chinese versions of translations of his works.Among those,Jiao Juyin's version and Cao Minglun's version are both excellent and well received by Chinese readers.However,there are a lot of differences between the two versions.The differences between the two versions cannot be easily explained as variation in personal preference.There are much deeper reasons behind them.The author aims to reveal the rules that the two versions are influenced by the translational norms of different translation periods,which will provide a more solid theoretical basis for the development of the translation practice of the works of Edgar Allan Poe in the future.The two translations which were published in the 1940 s and 1990 s respectively involve long time span,which is the main reason why they manifest different features translated from the same source texts.First,the author made a contrast between the two versions of their language features,including the differences in their choices of words,different grammatical structures and stylistic features.Then,in order to explore the reason why the two versions are different in the use of language,the author made a contrast between the two versions according to their different translation techniques.They selected different translation techniques to deal with the differences between Chinese and English language,including addition,inversion,conversion and annotation.We can find out that Jiao Juyin tried his best to maintain the content and form of the source text and only made some slight changes when necessary,while Cao Minglun changed the form of the source text more freely in order to better convey the core contents and the soul of the source text.From their different choices of translation techniques,we can conclude that they must have been governed by different norms.To find out the reasons,the author set out to analyze the contexts of the two versions,including the historical,cultural and theoretical contexts of the two versions.If the historical and cultural backgrounds are the underlying causes which govern the translators' choices of translation strategy,then the theoretical contexts of the translators are the superficial reasons.All in all,their purposes when translating Edgar Allen Poe's works are different because of the tastes of their target readers,theacceptance of the mainstream of Chinese literary circle and their personal translation criteria.All the elements above resulted in the two different versions.This thesis is to discover how and in what degree translation is affected by the Chinese contexts.