A Comparative Study On Two Chinese Versions Of Alice's Adventures In Wonderland From The Perspective Of Toury's Translation Norms

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland becomes the most notable book written by British writer Lewis Carroll who was regarded as the“Father of Children's Literature”in the 19~thh century.The first Chinese version of the novel done by Zhao Yuanren in 1922 was considered the most classic one,while another prominent version translated by Leng Shan in 2010 was recognized as the encyclopedic one.Both versions win the fondness of the target readers in spite of many differences between them.This thesis conducted a comparative and descriptive study on Zhao Yuanren's and Leng Shan's translations of Alice Adventures in Wonderland on the basis of Toury's translation norms,in order to reconstruct the norms in the target language which affect the translators and their translation in translating process.Gideon Toury,a professor at Tel Aviv University in Israel,is considered as a prominent and influential translation theorist for his remarkable contributions to the development of descriptive translation studies.Translation norms are central to the representative viewpoints of his translation theory,which bring social,cultural and historical factors into translation study and provide a new perspective for the comparative study of translation.Toury claims that translation is a norm-governed activity and norms can operate at every stage in the translation process.So he distinguishes three kinds of translation norms:preliminary norms,initial norms and operational norms.Preliminary norms involve factors governing the choice of the work and overall translation strategy.Both of these two versions are direct translation only for they are different in that they are affected by different translation policies.Initial norms determine the choice of overall translation tendency,under which the comparative analysis on the translation of names and culture-loaded words shows that Zhao Yuanren chooses the tendency of acceptability while Leng Shan chooses adequacy.Operational norms affect the segmentation of the translated version and specific translation strategies.The most distinctive difference between these two versions under operational norms is Leng Shan's addition of annotations.Besides,Both of these two versions are faithful to the original text and show great respect to the norms in the target language,which means that translators should pay attention to the extra-textual factors during their translation.Distinguished from the previous studies,the thesis focuses on analyzing the similarities and differences of two versions by putting the translation in its historical and cultural backgrounds to find out the factors affecting translator's translation process.The main part of the thesis is composed of four chapters.Chapter one mainly introduces the theoretical framework including the origin and development of Toury's translation norms and its classification.Chapter two discusses translators'expectancy in selecting the source text under preliminary norms and initial norms.Chapter three adopts a bottom-up approach to compare these two versions by supplying numerous examples based on operational norms to reconstruct translation norms in the target language.Chapter four summarizes the similarities and differences of Zhao's and Leng's versions as well as the causes behind.In addition,it tries to show the significance of applying Toury's translation norms into children's literature translation.