A Descriptive Study On Xu Chi's Translation Of Walden

Walden is the masterpiece of Henry David Thoreau, who is one of the greatest leaders of American Transcendental Literature. With its delicate language, picturesque imageries and particularly the incisive thoughts, this book has long been acknowledged as one of the most influential western classics. Xu Chi, a famous Chinese essayist and translator, first translated the book into Chinese, and thereafter it has also been translated for many times in China. So far there have been more than 40 Chinese versions of Walden, among which Xu Chi's revised version published in 1982 enjoys great popularity and has influenced the later translations of Walden. Therefore, the book and its various translated versions have gradually become a focus for study in China. In the thesis, the author attempts to conduct a descriptive study on Xu Chi's translation of Walden from the perspective of Toury's translation norm theory.According to Toury, translation is a process in which the translator has to make a series of decisions, and translation norms reflects the factors which govern translator's decision-makings in a specific translation process. Translation norms play a role at each stage of translation process, Toury subdivides these norms into preliminary norms, initial norms and operational norms. His categories respectively relate to the choice of the source text, the choice of translation strategy and the choice of language materials. The paper is composed of six chapters. In the first chapter, the author introduces the source and target texts involved in the study and illustrates background, objectives, methodology and significance of the study. In the second chapter, the author makes a review of studies on Xu Chi's translation of Walden. Besides, the author elaborates Gideon Toury's translation norm theory. From chapter three to chapter five, the author explores the factors affecting Xu Chi's choice of Walden, translation tendency and his actual operations in translation respectively from the perspective of preliminary norms, initial norms and operational norms. In the last chapter, the author draws a conclusion of major findings and limitations of the study. Here are the major results of the study:To begin with, through the study of preliminary norms, the author finds out that, the support of patron plays a great role in Xu Chi's initial choice of Walden. In addition, his preference to Walden, admiration for Thoreau, and the expectation of Chinese literature in 1980s impel Xu Chi to revise his initial translation of Walden.Secondly, by the study of initial norms, the author finds out that, Xu Chi's translation, Waerdeng Hu, is more adequacy-oriented and this tendency reflects that Xu Chi tends to the source cultural system. His translation tendency results from the central position of translation in the target literary system, the influence of the popular translation tendency and the purpose of Xu Chi's translation of Walden.Finally, with the study of operational norms, the author finds out that, Xu Chi extensively adopts Europeanized sentence structures and retains western cultural images of the source text by literal translation or transliteration with annotations. These concrete translation actions comply with the translator's overall translation tendency of adequacy, but there are still some exceptions. For example, by comparing the matrixes and textual-linguistic materials of the source text with those of the target text, some findings can be illustrated as follows: there are slight adjustments in the distribution of some paragraphs; there are some illusions originating from Chinese classics, which Xu Chi restores with classical Chinese by dating back to their source texts; in diction, Xu Chi uses a large numbers of four-character, reduplicated and old-fashioned words. Those special translation phenomena embody Xu Chi's concrete choices of language materials which constitute the target text. In general, Xu Chi's choice and processing of language materials are influenced by the factors such as popular model of essay in the target literary system, reader's acceptability and Xu Chi's personal understanding of Walden.