A Report On The E-C Translation Of The Ghana Reader(Chapter One) From The Perspective Of Toury’s Theory Of Translation Norm

The Ghana Reader is a cultural book that integrates Ghana’s history,culture and politics.Comprised of an overview and eleven articles,the first chapter of the book introduces the development history of various ethnic groups in Ghana,mainly from their oral traditions,archaeological studies and folk songs.Based on the English-Chinese translation practice project of Chapter One of The Ghana Reader,this report summarizes and analyzes the translation work from the perspective of Toury’s theory of translation norms.The so-called norm is a concept from sociology,which generally refers to the social value consensus.Under the framework of Toury’s translation theory,it specifically means that there are some consensus on various social values regarding translation,which impacts translators’ decision-making at all stages of translation activities,including the initial,preliminary,and specific operational stages.Translators can choose to adhere to these value consensus and adopt a norm-abiding translation,or they can choose not to comply with them,thus adopting a norm-breaking translation.Referring to Toury’s theory of translation norms and weighing the author’s own ability,the author decides to adopt the norm-abiding translation.In the initial stage of the translation project,the author mainly accepts the translation norms of today’s Chinese society,and opts for “acceptable translation” as the directional guidance of the whole translation project.Regarding the preliminary stage,according to the value consensus on the translation and publishing in today’s Chinese society,the author selects Ghana,a country along the Belt and Road,as the subject of the translation project,and chooses a text which can be translated directly from English to Chinese.In the operational stage,various specific translation techniques and methods(such as,transliteration,literal translation and free translation)are employed to transform the source text in order to produce a fluent,natural and acceptable translation,based on the value consensus of today’s Chinese society and language in terms of lexical expression and syntactic structure.Limited by the author’s own ability,this translation project mainly takes the norm-abiding translation.Although the Chinese translation is basically fluent,natural and acceptable,many exotic expressions in the source text have not been fully conveyed.In other words,the adequacy of the source text is sacrificed to a certain extent while ensuring its acceptability.This is the main limitation of the practice of this translation project,and it is also what the author should pay attention to in future translation practice.