A Study On Character Remolding In Two English Versions Of Sanguo Yanyi: From The Perspective Of Descriptive Translation Studies

As one of the “Four Great Chinese Classics”, Sanguo Yanyi is of great value forstudying classical Chinese culture. At present, there are only two full-length Englishversions of Sanguo Yanyi, namely Brewitt-Taylor’s Romance of the Three Kingdomsand Moss Roberts’s Three Kingdoms, which have attracted many scholars doingresearch. As to characters in Sanguo Yanyi, there exist some researches centering oncharacters of the original text, but the research is much less on character remolding inthe two English versions.Descriptive Translation Studies aims to give appropriate evaluation to varioustranslations, broaden the field of translation research, and enrich strategies oftranslation practice. As an important representative of DTS, Gideon Toury proposesthe translation norm theory; classifies and describes three kinds ofnorms—preliminary norms, initial norms and operational norms.This thesis attempts to make a comparative analysis of character remolding intwo English versions of Sanguo Yanyi under the guidance of Toury’s norm theory,aiming at giving some suggestions for character remolding in the process oftranslating classical Chinese novels.The present paper consists of five chapters altogether. In Chapter One itintroduces the research background, the significance, the methodology and thestructure of the thesis. Chapter Two overviews three aspects, namely translations ofSanguo Yanyi, researches on two versions of Sanguo Yanyi, and the research state ofDTS at home. In Chapter Three, in the first place Descriptive Translation Studies isbriefly introduced, and then Toury’s norm theory is presented in detail. In light ofToury’s translational norms, a comparative study on how both translators remoldcharacters in their own versions is done in Chapter Four. The last chapter is theconclusion part of the thesis, mainly consisting of major findings and limitations.It can be concluded that both translators have been affected by textual andextra-textual factors, which make them have to compromise between the source and the target norms in order to achieve their respective translation aims; three kinds ofnorms influence translators’ choices at different stages of translation, such as choosingwhat kind of source text and translating methods.As to character remolding, Brewitt-Taylor adopts more target language normsso as to reach higher “acceptability” among target readers. On the contrary, Robertscompromises much more target norms to be consistent with the source languagenorms. Although both versions are widely accepted, characters in Rv are more faithfulto the original novel and represent more Chinese elements. Therefore, duringtranslating classical Chinese novels, if the translator intends to reproduce Chineseelements embodied in characters as many as possible, it is better to adopt “adequacy”,namely, to compromise the target language norms to obey the source language norms.