Translating Informative Texts In Light Of Toury’s Theory Of Translation Norms

This report is based on a translation project of The Story of Naxos,written by Nicholas Soames,a professional journalist covering classical music and judo.The Story of Naxos describes the changing landscape of the classical music record industry.It traces the history of Naxos Records from selling music records at extremely low prices to being a leading company in the classical music record industry.This book is an informative text,which emphasizes the authenticity and reliability of information.I was mainly responsible for translating the eighth and seventeenth chapters of this book.The theory of translation norms is the core of the descriptive translation studies.Toury systematically explained the theory of translation norms,thinking that in the actual translation process,translators are usually restricted by three types of norms: preliminary norms,initial norms and operational norms.Preliminary norms mainly involve the selection of translation texts and translation decisions.Initial norms refer to restricting the translator’s choice between two extreme tendencies.One is towards the source language and cultural norms,which called “adequacy”,another tendency is to obey the target language and cultural norms,which called “acceptability”.Operational norms refer to the decisions made by the translators in the actual translation process,which involve the selection of specific translation strategies and translation skills.Under the guidance of Toury’s theory of translation norms,I made an analysis from lexical,syntactic and discourse levels.According to the characteristics of informative text,I explored how to use initial norms and operational norms to guide the translation process and restore the source text,retained the linguistic and cultural characteristics of the source text,so that the target readers can better understand the content of the source text.In the process of translating the project,members of our translation project found that there are a lot of classical music terms,background knowledge,personal names and place names in this book.In order to overcome the difficulties in understanding in the process of translation,we have consulted a large amount of relevant professional information.By exploring the characteristics of informative text,considering the application and significance of Toury’s theory of translation norms in the translation of informative text,this report summarizes the translation strategies and skills needed in the translation process of informative text.Due to the accuracy of the informative text and the target language readers as the main audience,in the process of English-Chinese translation,the translator needs to follow the principle of acceptability as far as possible,adopt domesticating translation strategy to express the background information in the source text.I gained valuable experience in the practice of this translation project and hoped that applying this theory of translation can provide experience and implications for translating this type of text.