A Study Of Three Translated Versions Of The Time Machine From The Perspecitve Of Toury’s Theory Of Translation Norms

The Time Machine is the masterpiece of Herbert George Wells（1866-1946）whois a British renowned science fiction writer. Since the book has been introduced intoChina in1915, there have existed more than thirty translated Chinese versions. Butdomestic researches on the translations of the book are rare, so this thesis tries tocompare Yang Xinyi’s version, Shen Shiguang’s version and Wang Ruixin’s versionof The Time Machine from the perspective of Gideon Toury’s theory of translationnorms.Toury introduces the concept of norms to translation studies and furtherexcogitated ways to identify and classify translational norms. The purpose of theresearch lies not in the setting of translational rules but in finding the norms thatgovern the translators’ behavior in translation. He distinguishes three kinds oftranslation norms, including initial norms, preliminary norms and operational norms.The former two kinds of norms affect the translation at the macro level while the lastone at the micro level. Initial norms affect the translator’s tendency towards thesource text or to the target text in translating, and preliminary norms govern thechoice of the source text, namely the translation policy. Operational norms functionin the process of translation, directing the matrix of the translation and specifictranslation strategies.Firstly, the thesis analyzes how initial norms affect the translators’ overallorientations in translation. It finds that the three translated versions all conform to themain-stream norms at their times. Yang xinyi’s version is written in classical Chineseand the rewriting is done at a large scale, his version is acceptability-oriented, whileWang Ruixin’s version is adequacy-oriented, and Shen Shiguang’s version is acombination of acceptability and adequacy. Then the thesis analyzes differenthistorical backgrounds and different target readers’ expectation of the three versions.Therefore, it explores how preliminary norms affect the translators’ translation. What’s more, the analysis is made from the perspective of operational norms,including the translators’ segmentation of the text, additions and omissions, differentchoices of words, sentence structures and stylistic features.This thesis offers a fresh perspective for the study of the Chinese translations ofThe Time Machine with the application of Toury’s theory of translation norms toexplain how the different versions is affected by the translations norms and becomewhat they appear to be. And the thesis is expected to help people to get a betterunderstanding of the theory through the analysis.