On Translation Norms And Their Operation

The concept of norms is widely used in the social sciences, from law and ethics to social psychology and international relations. It was first introduced into translation in 1963 by Jin Levy, who associated "translation" with "norms" in his book Die literarische Ubersetzung ("Literary Translation", first published in Czech in 1963). Although it has become "both a key concept and a handy instrument" in descriptive translation studies, this concept has been used differently within the approach and its value has been both asserted strongly and called into question. In the present paper, the author intends to explore the nature of translation norms and their operation, with a view to applying the study to the practice of translation.In Introduction, the limitations of the concept of equivalence are first investigated in order to introduce the concept of norms as a new tool. Then, a survey of the functions fulfilled by the norms concept is given after a sketchy review of its source. In the last part of this section, the author points out the significance and originality of her research and outlines its structure.In Chapter One, the author reviews the development of the studies of the norms concept from three aspects: linguistic norms in translation studies, norms and conventions in text-linguistic approaches and translation norms in descriptive translation studies. At the same time, the author notices that there are differences of opinion and divergences of view on "norms" in regard to the definition, nature, scale, name, relation to translation, etc. and that their value has often been called into question in some way.In Chapter Two, the author first quotes three representative definitions of the norms concept and gives an analysis of each, pointing out their...