On The Translator’s Choices From The Perspective Of Toury’s Translation Norms

After the “cultural turn” in translation studies,more and more researchers have shown great interests in translator’s subjectivity which focuses on the translator’s important role in translation practice.Translator’s choices refer to multiple choices made by the translator in translating.Gideon Toury establishes a systematic translation norms theory by adopting the descriptive approach.The theory holds that translation is a norm-governed social activity and a decision-making activity with the translator’s autonomy.Within the domain of the tripartite model of Toury’s translation norms,the translator makes different choices under the governing of preliminary norms,initial norms and operational norms.Therefore,Toury’s translation norms theory provides the theoretical framework for describing the translator’s choices.Of Mice and Men,a representative work of American writer and Nobel laureate John Steinbeck,embodies rich connotation,unique style and profound conception,and thus has a wide and far-reaching impact all over the world.The majority of domestic studies focus on the novel itself,but studies on its Chinese translations are in the minority,which is inconsistent with its literary status.With the perspective of Toury’s translation norms theory,complementary explanations are provided to enrich studies on the Chinese translations of Of Mice and Men.Research methods such as comparison,induction and description are adopted in the study.Combined with specific cases in two Chinese versions of Of Mice and Men,the thesis describes the translator’s choices at different stages in translating from the perspectives of preliminary norms,initial norms and operational norms.The corpora used in the study choose from two translations spanning over half a century,one is translated by Qin Si and the other by Pan Hualin,to ensure significant difference in terms of contexts for translating.The selected cases,which embrace the representativeness,are distributed in each chapter of the novel,so as to better describe the translator’s choices in translating.In terms of describing translator’s choices from the perspective of Toury’s translation norms theory,the findings are presented below:1)Regarding the perspective of preliminary norms: in terms of translation policy,the selection of the source text is made by the translators after thoroughly considering factors like the novel and its author,target-language social background and the translator’s translating preference;in terms of directness of translation,the English proficiency of the translators is directly linked with the decision on direct translation.2)With respect to the perspective of initial norms: the translators are required to make an ongoing compromise between “adequacy” and “acceptability” for the translated text.From the macro-level aspect,both translators make the overall choice of pro-adequacy to punctuation handling and pro-acceptability to vocabulary selection;from the micro-level aspect,Qin Si prefers domestication approach to pursue“acceptability” while Pan Hualin tends to apply foreignization approach to go after“adequacy” in translating names of characters and expressions concerning religious culture.Besides,both translators aspire for “adequacy” or “acceptability” in translating English idioms according to target readers’ unfamiliarity towards their cultural images.3)In relation to the perspective of operational norms: in terms of matricial norms,the translators basically keep the same text layout with the source text without significant modification,but are expected to more align with target-language cultural norms by applying translation skills such as addition and omission;in terms of textual-linguistic norms,both translators adapt to target-language ways of expression in textual structure and conform to target-language cultural norms in lexical selection.The thesis describes and analyzes the translator’s choices in translating from the perspective of Toury’s translation norms theory exemplified by analytical cases in two Chinese versions of Of Mice and Men,which expands studies on Chinese translations of the novel.The study not only expounds relationship between translation norms and translator’s choices from the perspective of Toury’s translation norms theory,but also describes the translator’s choices with analytical cases accordingly,thus it is expected that some valuable inspiration for follow-up studies will be provided.