A Diachronic Study Of The Three Chinese Versions Of Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland From The Perspective Of Toury’s Translation Norms

Based on the Israeli scholar Gideon Toury’s translation norms theory, thisresearch is a diachronically comparative study upon three Chinese versions of Alice’sAdventures in Wonderland. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland describes a girl namedAlice stumbled into a rabbit-hole, meeting a variety of creatures, which leads herinto an adventurous journey. Formulated in1980s, Toury’s translation norms theorygreatly widens the scope of the translation studies. It provides scholars a morecomprehensive, thorough, and profound theoretical basis and guidance. Tourydivides the translation norms into three categories: initial norms, preliminary normsand operational norms. They are closely related and influenced by each other.This thesis is attempting to seek answers to the following three questions:1) Based on the observation of the differences among the three Chineseversions, which one is the most adherent to the target culture and which one is theleast? What kinds of initial norms are respectively adopted in translation?2) As the language changes, how do social ideology, rhetoric and lexicologywork in three Chinese versions and what are the translators’ influences on thetranslated products?3) How can those factors of social ideology, rhetoric, lexicology and thetranslators themselves be concluded as constraining factors as the operational normsand preliminary norms of the three Chinese versions are examined?This thesis first has a review over the researches of Alice’s Adventures inWonderland in China, including all the previous studies that have been done homeand abroad. Among these studies, some scholars analyze the features of the languageof the original work, and others study the translated versions of Alice’s Adventures inWonderland, probing the translation strategies under guidance of a certain theory.Neither of them concerns exploring the fundamental reasons why the translated versions come in this way. Thus the author of this thesis chooses to conduct thepresent subject in a diachronic way, which may provide a new perspective for afurther probing that has never been fully studied.By comparing three translated versions in different historical phases, we canfind out the changes in Chinese languages and how the changes happen. The threeversions are Zhao Yuanren’s in1922, Chen Fu’an’s in1987and Wang Yongnian’s in2003. First of all, a statistic analysis is made by comparing their file size, type/tokenratio, average sentence length according to three corpora. It shows that none of thethree variables are the same, which indicates that the Chinese language changesthroughout time.Furthermore, under the guidance of Toury’s translation norms, combining thesocial ideologies at different times, the rhetoric usages in translation, the loss of theoriginal meanings of the words and the translators’ language abilities, the thesisexplores the translation norms lying behind all selected examples. Then a conclusionis drawn that Zhao Yuanren makes a marvelous translation both in rhetoric andlexical aspects. It is because his translation was done at the particular time after theMay4th Movement and that Zhao Yuanren chose to follow the norms of the targetlanguage. As time goes by, Chen Fu’an’s version shows lots of changes. Due to lackof thoughtful consideration on words and rhetoric uses, some unique characteristicsof English language are lost in the process of translation. The third version issubjected to the source culture norms. Because of the different social backgrounds,the different understandings of the original work, many of the humorous andeccentric parts are ruled out by Wang Yongnian. To sum up, the social ideology ofcertain times, the rhetoric usages in texts, the difficult transition of lexical items intoanother language and the personal handling of the languages by different translatorsinfluence the language of translation.With Toury’s translation norms as the theoretical basis, this thesis tries to get asound foundation and well-framed construction. After all the analyses, the finalconclusion is that besides the influence of the time, the language of translation isalso affected by social ideology of certain time, the rhetoric usages in texts, the difficult translation of lexical items and the language abilities of different translators.Briefly, Toury’s translation norms can help us study better and more systematicallyin certain historical times when translators conducted their translations. In addition,it provides a brand-new angle for exploring the social ideology, translated works andeven readers’ reactions to translators.