A Comprative Study On Two Chinese Versions Of Silent Spring From Toury’s Translation Norms Theory

Since the 18 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China,environmental protection are highly valued by Chinese people and correspondingly a great number of popular science literary works are published.The number of Chinese versions of Silent Spring,a pioneering work in protecting the environment,has increased sharply in the past five years.They are also welcomed by many Chinese people.Therefore,translation studies on the Chinese versions of Silent Spring have certain research value.Based on Toury’s translation norms theory,a descriptive study will be conducted on Lv Ruilan and Li Changsheng’s version of Silent Spring published in 1979 and Xin Hongjuan’s version in 2018.Firstly,concerning preliminary norms,translators’ selection of Silent Spring is influenced by sociocultural factors and personal preferences.Lv Ruilan and Li Changsheng translate it in order to introduce an environmental protection work to China and popularize the environmental protection concept among the Chinese people.Being a professor in the field of geobiochemistry,Li Changsheng has a responsibility to introduce Silent Spring,an environmental book,to China.Xin Hongjuan has read this work since she is a child,which makes her know the concept of environmental protection.And another reason for her translation activity is that one of her students,a foreign editor in Yilin Press,entrusts her to translate Silent Spring.Secondly,the operational norms affect translators’ different translating methods.Lv Ruilan and Li Changsheng’s translation retains the original sentence structure and expressions;Xin Hongjuan makes her translation easier to understand by footnoting and dividing long sentences,and also she translates with artistic expressions to make her translation to be rich of literariness.By reconstructing operational norms,it is easy to see that Lv Ruilan and Li Changsheng’s translation is more accurate,while Xin Hongjuan’s one is more acceptable.With the two Chinese versions of Silent Spring as research objects,this paper makes a comparative study on the impact of translation norms on translators’ choices during the entire translation process,which is a supplement to the translation studies on popular science literature.And this paper is also expected to bring some enlightenment to translation studies on Silent Spring.