Translation Norms Within A Descriptive-Explanative Model: On Toury's Rationale For Descriptive Translation Studies

This paper aims to introduce Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) put forward by Israeli scholar Gideon Toury as well as its major notion of translation norms, and apply it to the comparative study of Chinese translation tradition from 1919 to 1949.Since 1970s, Translation Studies developed rapidly after J. S. Holmes' conforming and categorizing work. Itama Even-Zohar's Polysystem theory places social symbols in an interrelated polysystem, thus enables Translation Studies to discover a descriptive, target-oriented, functional and systemic approach. Therefrom, studies of translation shift from pure theoretical expatiation to text description. And later on this approach further improves in the 90s in Toury's rationale for systematic DTS.Toury's DTS and the notion of translation norms that derived from it emphasize the study of relationship among writers, works, readers and translation norms between the source and target systems. Taking a larger range of topics, such as the purpose of writing and translating, pragmatic and recipient relationships between source and target languages, and even publication and distribution, into consideration, Toury claims that translators do not need to be constrained by strict equivalence and acceptance between the source and target poles. Quality of a translation is determined by the special features of a given literary work and the hence created translation norms of different levels. And the translator's job is to find those norms through practice.Therefore, norms of translation and the descriptive rationale do help us to carry out comparative studies in Chinese translation tradition, especially after the May Fourth Movement from 1919 to 1949. Because the translation of British and American literary works during that period, no matter from the amount of translated works, categories, and translation strategies, did take on a realization of translation norms in practice within a special cultural system, and a practical approach in general.