A Study On The Moon Opera From The Perspective Of Toury's Norm Theory

Qingyi,a novella written by renowned contemporary author Bi Feiyu,has the unique language of philosophic sense,with abundant Peking Opera elements which adds more cultural glamour to the novel.Howard Goldblatt,who was granted as “the chief Chinese contemporary translator”,co-worked with his wife Sylvia Li-Chun Lin at the invitation of British Telegram Books,to translate Qingyi into the English version---The Moon Opera.It enjoyed great popularity among readers,and in 2008,The Moon Opera was entered into the finalist at the Independent Foreign Fiction inaugurated by British newspaper The Independent.In 1970 s,Gideon Toury,based on James Homle's translation studies theroy and Even-Zohar's polysystem theory,firstly put forward the translation norm theory and comprehensibly explored the translation norms.He holds that norms are occupied the center position in the translation activity,and the translator has to conform with three kinds of translation norms : initial norm,preliminary norms and operational norms.This thesis is going to make a descriptive study of The Moon Opera from the perspective of Toury's norm theory,and attemps to detect the translation norms that affect the translation.In Toury's view,translation is a norm-governed activity,so the translator has to follow the norms in the source culture and the norms in the target culture in order to achieve the goal of translation.By comparing the translated text with the source text,it can be observed that in the translation process,the translator's behaviour is regulated by different translation norms at various stages.Concerning the preliminary norms,the selection of Qingyi as the translation object is influenced by translation policy,such as the social-cultural environment,the agents and commericial publishing houses,the specific value of Qingyi;meanwhile,the directness of translation is related with translator's educational background and personal translation ability.Considering the positions of the source culture and the target culture within the whole cultural polysystem as well as the expentancy of target readers,the translators are inclined to make the translation more acceptable than adequate.In dealing with the matrix of the source text,the translators make the additions,omission,changes of location and textual segmentation in the translation,but keep the fullness of the source text as much as possible.In the process of choosing the substituting material to replace the source text,the translators,regulated by the textual-lingusitic norms,adopt several translation methods to try to retain the cultual information in the source text respectively from three aspects: lexical item,sentence,stylistic feature;and work hard to keep the translation faithful.But because of language and cultural differences,the translators have to make some language shifts to make the translation more influent and natural,in order to reduce the reading pressure of target readers and meet the target readers' expectancies.Toury's norm theory provide a new perspective for the study of the English translation of Qingyi.This thesis is expected to find out the textual and extra-textual factors which influence the translation decisions of translators by analyzing the translation,and give some enlightenments for the export of Chinese contemporary literatures.