A Report On E-C Translation Of Man Gone Down (Excerpts) From The Perspective Of Toury’s Theory Of Translation Norms

Man Gone Down,an African-American centering around racial discrimination and American dream,profoundly reveals the truth that,even in the post-civil rights era,the social status and living conditions of the underprivileged African-Americans have not been improved notably.The novel,featuring daily conversations with striking characters,focuses on inner world and psychological activities of the unnamed narrator.It tells the narrator’s journey from floundering in the quagmire of despair to plunging ahead against all odds,which,from all angles,shows readers the relationship between racism and American dream.Therefore,its author Michael Thomas,by virtue of this novel,won the International Dublin Literary Award in 2009.The author’s translation of this novel aims to reveal the above-mentioned truth to Chinese readers and recreate the situation of the underprivileged African-Americans in the post-civil rights era,hoping that they can get out of troubles as soon as possible.Translation is a social practical activity,functioning as bridges between languages.Generally speaking,social practical activities are governed by social norms.Likewise,translators,in building these bridges,are also subject to the constraints of the norms of source and target language systems.Gideon Toury,a famous Israeli translator and translation theorist,puts forward translation norms theory through a lot of translation practice of literature works.According to him,translation norms are divided into preliminary norms,initial norms and operational norms,providing translators with rules to observe in actual translation.Adequacy and acceptability are the two very important concepts in the theory,offering translators much freedom.So far,this theory has been widely applied in literary translation.However,it is rarely seen in E-C translation practice reports of African-American novels.Therefore,the author intends to verify the feasibility of application of Toury’s Theory of Translation Norms in African-American novels.Through translation practice,the author finds that it is feasible to translate AfricanAmerican novels under the guidance of Toury’s Theory of Translation Norms.Besides,the author,by employing examples,concludes that the use of translation strategies including such as amplification,omission,word order adjustment,annotation,selection of word meaning and change of voices helps to strike a dynamic balance between adequacy and acceptability,which greatly improves the readability of the renderings.The author,however,finds some problems and sums up some experience in applying the theory in translation of Man Gone Down.For instance,boundary between adequacy and acceptability is hard to define;translators are supposed to be flexible and exert their subjective activeness,not sticking to some certain theory or translation technique in actual translation.