A Translation Study Of Si Zhou Zhi From Perspective Of Toury's Norm Theory

Si Zhou Zhi is a geographical translation work both sponsored and supervised by Commissioner Lin Zexu(1785-1850),who was also responsible for the smoking banning in Guangzhou before the first Opium War(1840-1842).In order to collect sufficient information about western countries and get prepared for the imminent war,he organized a translation team to work on Murray's The Encyclopedia of Geography and later polished its translated draft.Unfortunately,the original version of Si Zhou Zhi is now untraceable,and the earliest one available is that included in the fifty-volume version of Hai Guo Tu Zhi(1844).At present,most studies of Si Zhou Zhi concern its historical and geographical value,with few scholars carrying out any innovative translation studies on it.Consequently,this thesis intends to make a descriptive comparison between the source and target text on the basis of Toury's translational norms.In the 1970 s,the cultural turn in translation studies shifted the focus from pure linguistic aspect to the social-cultural factors influencing translation activities.Gideon Toury,a renowned translation theorist in Israel,first puts forward the idea to study the translational norms systematically and then focuses on the target culture's influence upon the translation activities as well as other related translation products.After a series of case studies,he proposes three categories of translational norms: preliminary norms,initial norms and operational norms.The preliminary norms determine the selection of theme and certain source text while the initial norms affect the translator's inclination towards either the target culture or the source culture.The operational norms,which function throughout the whole text,shape the literary style and specific translation skills.This thesis firstly discusses how such preliminary norms as the translation policy prevailing in late Qing Dynasty constrained Lin Zexu's translation activities,the selection of theme and the source text,to be exact.Then in light of the social and historical context,we attempt to combine the target readers' expectation and the translation team's intention together to provide a sound explanation for Si Zhou Zhi's overall orientation towards acceptability.Finally,operational norms would also be reconstructed in view to some significant translation decisions,particularly the addition of Lin Zexu's comments and interlinear notes,and the choice of classical Chinese literary style to which Lin Zexu attributed a lot.This thesis intends to provide a new perspective for the study of Si Zhou Zhi,and further clarify how the above-mentioned norms work during the translation process.With such a convincing illustration,we may,in turn,get a better understanding of Toury's norm theory and apply it to the translation analysis.