A Study On The E-C Translation Of Judicial Culture In Tang Dynasty From The Perspective Of Toury’s Translational Norms

Chinese court case fiction is a type of novel expressing characteristics of Chinese indigenous culture while has gradually declined under the impact of Western culture in modern times.However,the Dutch sinologist Robert Hans van Gulik created the series novel Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee,a combination of Chinese and foreign characteristics,to inject fresh blood into Chinese court case fiction and promote the development of it.The Chinese Maze Murders was so well welcomed at home and abroad that it laid the foundations for the success of the subsequent stories in Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee.The content of Chinese court case fiction mainly involves detection and examination,which is most emblematic of judicial culture.Therefore,its translation is worth starting from judicial culture to explore the influential factors behind the success of translating The Chinese Maze Murders.This paper analyzes the judicial culture of The Chinese Maze Murders by Gulik from the perspective of Toury’s translational norms theory.To be more specific,it explores the translation characteristics of different forms of judicial culture and discovers their influencing factors from three levels: preliminary norms,initial norms and operational norms.According to the classification of culture proposed by Nida and Newmark and the relevant elements of judicial culture,this paper divides the research object into the material,ideological,behavioral,organizational and system forms of judicial culture and discusses the five forms separately so as to summarize the characteristics of the five different forms of judicial culture in the process of translation from English to Chinese.The following conclusions are drawn from this analysis: translational norms,reflected in the translation process of the five forms of judicial culture in the book The Chinese Maze Murders,have similarities at the macro-level and differences at the micro-level.From the perspective of preliminary norms,the translation of judicial culture is influenced by the call for the protection and promotion of traditional Chinese culture in the 1980 s.The translator Chen Laiyuan chooses The Chinese Maze Murders as the source text aiming to promote the popularisation and transmission of traditional Chinese culture.From the perspective of initial norms,the translations of the five forms of judicial culture follow the linguistic and cultural norms of the target language,and their translation generally tends to be acceptable.The translation tendency is influenced by the selection of source text.From the perspective of operational norms,the system form and the ideological form of judicial culture adopt more addition and omission to the information of the source language than other forms of judicial culture in the translation process.Since the judicial system and ideology are more abstract in nature and their expressing forms are more flexible between the source language culture and the target language culture.The material form and the organizational form of judicial culture mainly adopt substitution with information that has the same function in the target language and specification in the process of translating the source language.The behavioral form of judicial culture is more in line with the target language habits in the translation,primarily using quadrisyllabic words.In addition,to avoid understanding difficulties for the target language readers in terms of obscure words in The Chinese Maze Murders,Chen Laiyuan adopts annotation with Chinese pinyin.These translation methods also reflect the general acceptability of translation tendency.