A Comparative Study Of Two Chinese Versions Of Hamlet From Perspective Of Translation Norms

As one of the greatest dramatists in the world literature, Shakespeare is remembered by the entire world for centuries and his works are read, put onto the stage, loved and memorized with an intense passion. In China, a lot of translators are touched by the beauty of Shakespeare's works, to have devoted hard to translating of Shakespeare. In the past 150 years, China has made great progress in the field of Shakespearean translation studies. However, there are a lot of things to be done. Up till now, people have seldom studied the translations of Shakespearean dramas at different times from the perspective of norm theory. Dominated by Chesterman's theory of translation norms, this thesis takes advantage of descriptive translation study as the fundamental theory frame in order to find out some factors which affect the translations of Hamlet at different times.According to Chesterman's theory, translation norms are divided into two main categories: expectancy norms and professional norms which are related to comprehension strategies and production strategies respectively. On these theoretic bases, the comparison of two Chinese versions of Hamlet at different times is from macro and micro perspectives.This thesis is composed of six parts. Research questions, theoretical foundations, significance of the research are in the first part. The second part is introduction of translation norm theory and Chesterman's theory is the focus of this part. A general survey of William Shakespeare and the translation of his drama Hamlet in China are mentioned in the next part. Next two chapters are the most important ones. It is the comparative parts that deal with Shakespeare's Hamlet at different times by Zhu Shenghao and Fang Ping respectively. From the macro perspectives, the descriptive analysis of expectancy norms and comprehension strategies is adopted to research the influence of expectation of readers, accountability norms and communication norms. Then, the micro perspectives, such as grammatical, semantic, pragmatic strategies and integrated study in production strategies are used to study their influence upon translation.At last, the thesis mentions some implications from the case study directed by descriptive translation studies. The possible conclusions are: firstly, norms are able to constrain the translator's behavior, though the translator sometimes stands against the norms. Secondly, the translation norm approach is descriptive in nature, rather than prescriptive. Thirdly, retranslation is a process that shows a strong relevance between norms and translator. Last but not least, the strengths of norm theory can be substantiated by their application to the linguistic manipulation to the translated text.