A Study On The Trumpet Of The Swan From The Perspective Of Chesterman’s Translation Norm Theory

As an important part of literature,children’s literature is different from adult literature in that it often consists of short sentences,colloquial sentences and reduplicated sentences.When translating foreign children’s works,how to transform the characteristics of the original text into authentic Chinese children’s language is significantly important.This paper selects The Trumpet of the Swan written by the American writer E.B.White as the research object to analyze the translation strategies of children’s literature adopted by Ren Rongrong in the translation process.As a well-known translator and theorist of children’s literature in contemporary China,Ren Rongrong has translated more than 300 foreign children literature works and gained popularity.His translation also has a certain degree of authority.Ren’s translations are of great significance to the translation of children’s literature.It is necessary to study the translation strategies of children’s literature from a systematic theory,this paper will study the translation strategies adopted by Ren Rongrong in The Trumpet of the Swan’s Chinese version on the basis of Chesterman’s translation norm theory.Expectancy norms and professional norms are the two major norms in Chesterman’s translation norms theory.The former is determined by the target language readers’ expectations of the target text environment,while the latter is subdivided into accountability norms,communication norms and relation norms.The translator will be influenced by external and internal factors,such as social and cultural backgrounds,text types,target readers and so on.The translator should take these factors into account and give priority to certain factors according to certain circumstances,and translate by choosing appropriate translation strategies.By analyzing the language of The Trumpet of the Swan’s two versions,the author summarizes and classifies the translation strategies embodied in the translation and analyzes them from the perspectives of syntax,morphology,rhetoric,culture and so on.Through comparisons and analysis,it is found that the norms can be easily found in Ren Rongrong’s choices of translation strategies.This thesis also sums up the translation strategies adopted in Ren Rongrong’s translation,such as the use of short sentences and the simplification of sentence structure,repetition,exclamation,onomatopoeia,rhyme.It provides another theoretical perspective and research method for the study of children literature translation.