A Case Study Of Zhou Shoujuan’s Translation Anthology Of Famous European And American Short Stories From The Perspective Of Gideon Toury’s Translational Norm Theory

Literary translation is not only code-switching, but also a type of social activity which is closely restricted by the target culture and history. Therefore, the study of a translated text at the linguistic level is unlikely to be representative of the general translation phenomenon, since it does not take the multiple social and political factors into consideration. However, nowadays researches on Zhou Shoujuan’s Anthology of Famous European and American Short Stories from those perspectives are in small quantities and there are relatively few complete studies on this translated version from the perspective of Toury’s translational norm theory. The thesis attempts to conduct a descriptive study according to the three translational norms proposed by Gideon Toury on the entire translation process of this translated text, covering the translator’s selection of the original text, the integral translation strategy and detailed methods in the translating process, thus to carry a more comprehensive analysis.Focusing on the actual translating process, this study carries out a contrastive analysis on the Anthology of Famous European and American Short Stories. Firstly, the factors contributing to the selection of the original text are explored in terms of preliminary norms, and then the overall translation strategy adopted and the reasons for so doing are detected in terms of initial norms. Finally, the detailed translation methods employed and the reasons for a series of choices are analyzed in terms of operational norms. Based on the analysis, a conclusion can be drawn that although the translated text is produced by the translator who has made a series of choices during the translating process, those choices are influenced or restricted by the linguistic norms and the sociocultural norms in the target society at a particular point of time. Thus, the translated text is definitely a distortion as a result of the collision between two systems of language and culture. This research proves another explanatory force of Gideon Toury’s translational norm theory to the translation phenomenon and what is more may provide some revelation for the translating tasks of classical foreign literature works.