A Comparative Study Of The Two English Versions Of Wenxin Diaolong From The Perspective Of Norm Theory

Translation has long been regarded as a derivative rather than creative activity. With the development of descriptive translation studies, research on translation has been shifted from focusing on source text and culture to target text and culture. And more attention has been paid to differences between the original text and its translations, as well as differences between translations themselves. Norm Theory, put forward by Gideon Toury, is powerful in offering explanations for these differences.Since the methodology greatly influences the findings of the research, corpus-based approach is introduced so to offer an objective description for the present study. By compiling small corpora, the present study does a comparative work of the two English versions of Wenxin Diaolong on three levels. The findings reveal that:At the lexical level, the diction in Owen’s version has more variance than that of Yang Guobin’s version and lexical words in Owen’s version also outnumber those of Yang’s version. However, as for the translation of literary terms, Yang Guobin adopts a more flexible way than Owen does.At the syntactic level, sentences in Owen’s version tend to be much longer and more complex than those of Yang’s version, which shows that emphases are laid on preciseness and naturalness respectively.At the textual level, Yang’s version is much looser in structure than Owen’s for its employment of less connectors to achieve cohesion.Norm Theory reveals that these differences are the result of the original text itself and a series of external social factors. Besides, subjectivity of the two translators also contributes to some of differences.