On Translation of Shaanxi Dialect-featured Works Based on Gideon Toury’s Theory of Translation Norms: A Case Study of Life and Its English Translation

| ABSTRACT This research analyzes Chloe Estep's translated version Life(《人生》)in a descriptive and explanatory way based on Gideon Toury's Translation Norms. By investigating the reason why Estep chose to translate this book under the influence of preliminary norm, the orientation of her translation governed by initial norm and specific translation strategies guided by operational norm, the paper intends to prove Translation Norms to some degree influence translating process and more importantly analyze Estep's strategy and skills on translating Shaanxi dialect-featured words and sentences. By investigating the forming mechanism behind this translated work, the paper hopes to make some contribution to translating Shaanxi dialect-featured literary works and descriptively analyzing the translated version of Chinese literature.

At present, the study and analysis on Shaanxi dialect translation are not that comprehensive. Once Yuan Yi(2019) analyzed the English translation strategy of this dialect based on Howard Goldblatt's translated version of Deserted City written by Jia Pingwa from the Heterogeneity and Variability perspective. The study analyzed some cases of dialect translation by Goldblatt, which did not give comprehensive and detailed instructions on Shaanxi dialect translation strategies or skills such as how to rationally put verbs, nouns, adjectives or even some clauses of such dialect features into English.
Against the research backdrop above, this study chose Estep's English translated version of Lu Yao's Life as an analysis text and Gideon Toury's Translation Norms as a theoretical basis to analyze how the translator deals with Shaanxi dialect translation in a descriptive and explanatory way. In doing so, the intention of this research is to find out Estep's choice and strategy when translating Life, especially its dialect-featured style under the impact of the initial norm, preliminary norm and operational norm put forward by Toury. Then, in the end, the paper will conclude the mechanism is guiding the formation of the translated version, systematically analyzing Estep's way of dealing with shaanxi style works in glossary, syntax and the whole book, which can provide suggestions on shaanxi style literature translation, add further analyzing strategy and structure of researching translated Chinese literature in a critical and explanatory manner and promote the spread of Chinese culture.

Overview of Toury's Translation Norms
Translation norms were firstly and systematically discussed by Gideon Toury, enlightened by translators like Itamar Even-Zohar. Later this theory constituted a core part of descriptive translation studies. In 1980, Toury put forward this concept in his paper The Nature and Role of Norms in Literary Translation. In this research, based on literary translation cases, he described the quality, type, and function of translation norms (Toury, 1980:51-62). Then in 1995, Toury further extended this theory from literary translation application to a guiding principle applicable in a general translation scope in his book Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond.
In the second chapter, The Nature and Role of Norms in Translation, Toury systematically expounded translation norms. In this chapter, Toury affirmed that Translation activities should be regarded as having cultural significance (Toury, 1995:53). The year 2012 saw a revised edition of Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond, in which Toury further elaborated the relevance between translation and norms.
The norms put forward by Toury were not absolutely objective or completely subjectively styled. Instead, it is a kind of "behavior guide" between objective and subjective consideration. In other words, such norms are guides extracted from social consensus, namely the right and wrong standards approved by the whole society. These guides can be applied in specific situations, clearly telling people what the prohibition is and to what degree one behavior can be tolerated or permitted (Toury, 1995:54-55).
Toury categorized norms guiding and restraining translation into three types, namely preliminary norm, initial norm and operational norm. Preliminary norm deals with translation policy and directness, in which the former concerns factors influencing text type choice while the latter answers whether the translation is directly done from source language to target language. As for translation policy, it refers to those factors that govern the choice of text-types, or even of individual texts, to be imported through translation into a particular culture/language at a particular point in time. Such a policy will be said to exist insomuch as the choice is found to be nonrandom. Different policies may, of course, apply to different subgroups, in terms of either text-types(e.g., literacy vs Non-literacy) or human agents and groups thereof(e.g., different publishing houses), and the interface between the two often offers very fertile grounds for policy hunting (Toury, 1995:58).
The initial norm is about "adequacy" and "acceptability" of translation. In Toury's theory(1995:56): "A translator may subject him-/herself either to the original text, with the norms it has realized, or to the norms active in the target culture, or in that section of it which would host the end product. If the first stance is adopted, the translation will tend to subscribe to the norms of the source text and, through them, also to the norms of the source language and culture. This tendency has often been categorized as the pursuit of adequate translation. If, on the other hand, the second stance is adopted, norm systems of the target culture are triggered and set into motion." Thus if the translation adheres to source norms, it is adequate. If it subscribes to norms originated from the target culture, it is acceptable (Toury, 1995:56-57). As for operational norms, it regulates the actual translation process, including matricial norms dealing with the translator's consideration of whether to translate the source text completely and the text layout of the translated version. On top of matricial norm, the textual-linguistic norm is also a branch of the operational norm. It handles more detailed problems such as language usage in translation (Toury, 1995:58-59).
Preliminary norm is the first to influence the translation process (Wang Yunhong, 2013:11). The impact of the initial norm and preliminary norm on translation is before that of the operational norm, whereas the adequacy or acceptability caused by the initial norm to some degree decides the translator's strategy adoption. Such a mechanism elaborated by Toury incurs much attention from translators of different fields. It has been extensively adopted in translation studies. Therefore, the paper is guided by this theory, descriptively and explanatorily analyzing Chloe Estep's translated version of Life.

Translation Analysis of Life under Toury's Norms
Based on Toury's Translation norms, the paper analyzes the motives of Estep's choosing Life as source text under the guidance of preliminary norms, her translation orientation from the perspective of the initial norm and translation strategies and skills influenced by both initial norms and operational norm. From such analysis, rational skills and strategies in translating Shaanxi dialect-featured works will be concluded.

Preliminary Norm
As was mentioned before, the preliminary norm mainly deals with directness and translation policy. Chloe Estep directly translated Life from Chinese to English, so it is direct enough. Translation policy mainly deals with why a translator chooses certain source text to translate. Life is characterized by northern Shaanxi folkways, full of shaanxi dialect and some specialities of this region such as xintianyou(a kind of Shanxi local melody). From the 19 th century, America emphasized Chinese Folk Literature, and its scholars have secured great success in this field. For example, Sue Tuohy was an American specializing in the folk literature of northwest China. In 1988 she got her PhD through her thesis investigating Hua'er song in China's northwest region. Since then, her study and work were all closely related to this folk song (Zhang Duo, 2019). Therefore it can be deduced that Estep also intended to learn more about Chinese folk literature by translating Lu Yao's Life since what was depicted in this book was people's life at the starting

On Translation of Shaanxi Dialect-featured Works Based on Gideon Toury's Theory of Translation Norms: A Case Study of Life and Its English Translation
Page | 184 stage of China's rural reform, and the dialect-featured style is able to convey people's ideologies as well as social conditions at that time. Thus considering the folk literary features and social conditions in the 1980s showcased in this book, it is worth spreading.

Initial Norm
Influenced by the initial norm, though Estep herself was an American, she has tried to pursue the rules and style of Chinese. So it can be affirmed that her translation is generally adequate.
Estep's translation: Gao Jialin stood up, still lost in thought, then heard someone behind him call out, "Teacher Gao, are you home?" According to the parataxis/hypotaxis account, clauses in Chinese are placed one after another without any connectives to specify their relationships, whereas, in English, connectives are typically used to spell out the relationships between different clauses (Tse, 2010). However, in e.g.1, the number of clauses in the English version is 5, with each translated clause containing a verb or verbal phrase. So the structure of the English sentence corresponds to that of the original Chinese sentence, meaning such a syntactic layout of English is not typically hypotactic but is to some degree similar to parataxis-featured Chinese. Hence it can be deduced that in order to maintain the characteristics of source language syntax, namely full of short clauses and active verbs, Estep has tried to use similar clause numbers and active verb numbers though the position of these verbs is not completely the same as that of the original one. All these demonstrate that when translating this book, Estep has put more emphasis on maintaining the rules of Chinese syntax, or it can be said that her translation here is adequate.
Emphasizing Chinese syntactic rules but not English ones may be a result of Estep's willingness to show foreign readers the writing style of Lu Yao because to interpret the general meaning of a book is not that difficult but to maintain the style and features of the book or even the original author is challenging yet significant in that translation is something beyond transferring the meaning, it should also trigger readers' response similar to readers of the source text.

Operational Norm
As was mentioned before, the initial norm generally decides a translator's translating orientation, whose adequacy or acceptability determines the translator's choice and adoption of certain translation strategies and skills. Toury(1995:57) once proved that any detailed strategy or skill adopted when translating could find its ground in translation orientation. To some degree, the initial norm can directly or indirectly influence operational norms. Thus under the combinatorial impact of both initial norm and operational norm, the translator will adopt certain translation strategies and skills, constituting features of the target text.
In Estep's translated Life, the initial norm influences operational norm and eventually affects matricial norm and textual-linguistic norm. The style and characteristics of her translation are influenced by her choice of translation strategies and skills decided by both initial norm and operational norm. Specifically, Estep's translation orientation of adequacy or acceptability impacted by initial and operational norms as well as the matricial and textual-linguistic norms determine her translation style and features in words, sentences and the whole text.

Lexical Analysis
In terms of Estep's lexical translation, she acted fully in accordance with the requirements of the initial norm and operational norm when translating the verb-featured work containing lots of dialects.

Words' Dynamism
In Lu Yao's Life, the actions of each character are depicted directly through verbs, which is also a characteristic of the Chinese language. As was already analyzed before, Estep translated under the principle of "adequacy"; in other words, she sought to obey the rules of the source language while translating those actions. For example: Estep's translation: Jialin leaned against a date tree on the riverbank and stared at the silhouette of Ma Shuan as it disappeared into the green ocean of corn. He could not resist turning to look at Liu Liben's house on the other side of the river. Through analysis, it can be found that the source sentence structure in example 2 is "Subject+Predicate+Object", in which the subject and object are both performed by nouns, and the predicate is shown through verbs. As what Estep pursues in this translation is "adequacy", such a "S+P+V" structure is also kept in the target sentence, for "leaned against", "stared at", "disappeared into", "couldn't resist turning" and "look at" in translated sentence effectively correspond to "靠", "望", "没入", "忍不 住扭过头" and "望了望".In doing so, the translator has generally kept the feature of the original work in her translated version.

Dialect Translation
This work contains many dialects, including nouns, verbs and adjectives. Thus it can be said that the dialect of northwestern China is an indispensable feature in Life. Although previous analysis has demonstrated that translator Estep generally pursues the "adequacy" of her translation as the overall style of the translated version parallels with that of the original, when dealing with dialects, Estep did not totally keep the original work's style adopting "pinyin plus notes".
(1) Noun Nouns usually denote certain objects. In Life, there are some objects that are peculiar to northwest China during the late 20 th century, reflecting human beings' intelligence when inventing or developing tools to sustain their lives. When translating such nouns featured by specific regional characteristics, Estep did not adopt "pinyin plus notes"; rather, she tried to find English equivalents here to construe these featured nouns, which is though not that parallel with her overall principle of adequate translation. For example: Estep's translation: He could sort of make out his mother bringing some firewood in from the courtyard and puttering around with the bellows.
Here "风箱" is a previous countryside cooker used to fan up the fire for cooking. If looking up this word in the Chinese-English dictionary, it can be found that "bellow" is the most recommended English equivalent, which echoes Estep's choice. However, if looking up the connotation of "bellow" in the English dictionary Thethurus(p1), it can be found that this word is often used as a verb, whereas its meaning as a noun is something that can produce thick noise. To further testify the connotation of "bellow", the author searched online the pictures of "风箱"(p2)and bellow (p3), which shows that these two terms are not absolute equivalents, for "bellow" is often used in machinery equipment but not kitchen cooker. Though the analysis above shows there is some obscurity in Estep's translation in that such a featured tool of the northwest countryside is not quite perfectly presented in the target language, further meditation may explain Estep's intention when making such a choice.
As Life contains lots of dialects, especially nouns, If translator Estep chose to adopt "pinyin plus notes" to translate all these dialects, then the whole book will to a certain degree, lose readability. Though the noun equivalents here are not quite effective, they can firstly secure readership and leave readers a general impression that people in northwest Chinese countryside during the 20 th century still did not use many high-end technical tools in their daily lives. Though Estep chose some free translation of dialects, the syntactic structure of her translation still parallels with that of the original, which means, on the whole, she acts upon the principle of adequate translation.

P1
P2 P3 (2)Verb A verb is usually used to signify certain actions. In Life, some verbs are expressed by Lu Yao through dialects, some of which may be ambiguous if we interpret them through literal meaning. For example:

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E.g.4: 他死死按着儿子的光胳膊，央告他说："好我的小老子哩！你可千万不要闯这乱子呀！人家通着天哩！公社、县上都踩得地 皮响。你告他，除什么事也不顶，往后可把咱扣掐死呀！
Estep's translation: He kept a firm hold on his son's bare arms, imploring him, "My son, under no circumstances, must you stir up trouble. Their family has direct access to the authorities, and both the commune and the county will crush you and your complaint.
If you accuse him, aside from the fact that your complaint won't get any traction, it could ruin our family..." In example 4, "闯乱子", "通着天" and "扣掐" are verbal phrases full of Shaanxi local dialect characteristics. If looking at its literal meaning, readers may get a wrong understanding of its true meaning as these characters have their respective meaning till today. "通着天" literally means one has access to heaven though here it means the relationship between Gao Minglou and local authorities is quite close. In other words, "天" here does not denote heaven but local authorities. In terms of Estep's translation, she retained the essential meaning of these words and took no consideration of their language forms. This is understandable as literally translating them character by character will certainly lead to ambiguity or wrong understanding. So in this aspect, Estep gives priority to readers' understanding, which represents her "acceptable" handling of verb translation.

(3)Adjective
Except for nouns and verbs, adjectives in Life are sometimes also expressed through Shaanxi dialect, which may be a bit obscure for those unfamiliar with Shaanxi local culture. For example: E.g.5 "你不听人家说，巧珍是'盖满川'吗？"加林开玩笑说。 Estep's translation: "Haven't you heard everyone say that Qiaozhen is the prettiest flower in these mountains?" Jialin poked fun at him.
In example 5, "盖满川" is a Shaanxi dialect, meaning someone boasts enviable beauty, even all the flowers in the mountain are inferior to such great beauty. When translating this word, Estep directly expressed this meaning through metaphor, metaphorizing Qiaozhen as a flower more beautiful than any other flower in the mountains. In such a translation, not only did Estep accurately interpret the meaning of "盖满川" for foreign readers unfamiliar with Shaanxi culture, but also she kept the rhetorical features of the source word in an understandable way, which can greatly improve the readership.

Syntactic Analysis
Influenced by the initial norm, Estep emphasized more on the "adequacy" of Life's translation, which further affected the operational norm in the whole translation process, especially the language form (Toury, 1995:58;2012:82). Such a feature is comprehensively presented in the syntactic aspect.
Life's syntactic structure is not that complex, in which the "subject+predicate+object" and "serial verb construction" (one subject+several consecutive verbs) have more presence compared with other forms-affected by initial norm. Estep has tried to retain Life's syntactic characteristics; thus, her translation is also more featured by the "subject+predicate+object" structure.

Estep's Way of Handling "Serial Verb Construction" Structure
As was analyzed, there are many sentences featured by "one subject+several consecutive verbs" in Life. When handling these sentences, Estep, on the one hand, retains the general feature of original sentences, though, on the other hand, she also tries to secure the readership of her translation. For example: Estep's translation: Gao jialin laid his jacket on the ground and rested the back of his head in his hands, his body sprawled on the earth. Through cracks between the leaves, he let his eyes wander over the sky above, which was as clear as water.
In example 6, except for the second clause, other clauses share the same subject, "高加林". All the clauses are connected through commas, which is in line with the characteristics of the "serial verb construction" structure. In Estep's translation, the structure of the first three clauses is no different from that of the source sentence though she adopted the conjunction "and" between the first clause and the second one instead of connecting all these sentences through commas. After the first three clauses, Estep ended the sentence with a period, which is a bit different from the source sentence. This is a result of Estep's consideration of her translation's readability as in English, "serial verb construction" structure usually leads to confusion. However, generally, Estep's translation is "adequate" in that the subject, predicate and object in her translation remains the same kind as the source sentence.
In other words, Estep generally pursues the "adequacy" of her translation, though, in some clauses, she tends to prioritize the language feature of English.

Estep's Way of Translating Xintianyou
Xintianyou is one of the most significant parts of Life in that not only does it show Shaanxi local features, but also it well represents different characters' diverse feelings when they confront complex situations. Such a kind of locally featured melody suits each context in that it presents a sense of depression in a character's suffering and a sense of pleasure in his happiness. When translating these melodies, Estep has tried to maintain their original features, such as alliteration and metaphor. In this process, she also bears in mind the necessity of making the translation "adequate". For example: E.g.7: 上河里(那个)鸭子下河里鹅，一对对(哪个)毛眼眼望哥哥......
Estep's translation: Upstream a goose and downstream a gander, A lovely pair, she gazes bright-eyed at her brother... Example 7 is one sentence of xintianyou sung by female protagonist Liu Qiaozhen at the very beginning of Life. In this period, Qiaozhen was quite innocent and happy as she did not suffer that much, so the general style of this melody is lively and pleasing.
Considering the language feature of this sentence, it can be found that "鹅(e)" and "哥(ge)" rhyme each other. Besides, pronouns "那个(that)" and "哪个(which)" in brackets are necessary. On the one hand, they can complement the sound loss of the lyrics. On the other hand, the lack of the two brackets will lead to ambiguity and misunderstanding as the subject of "望哥哥" will be that pair of geese without "哪个" in the bracket. In Estep's translation, though she omits the brackets, she makes it clear what the real subjects are in these two clauses, especially the second one. "毛眼眼" in the source sentence is a Shaanxi dialect, describing the lively eyes of beautiful girls. In Estep's translation of this word, she also used the adjective "bright-eyed", though the first sight at this sentence may confuse the reader that grammatically, the word after verb "gazes" should be an adverb but not an adjective.
To understand this, the author thinks that just like the source word "毛眼眼" depicting the elegance and beauty of the female protagonist, "bright-eyed" here is adopted to describe the appearance of "she" but not to modify the action "gazes", which once again demonstrates that Estep has tried to echo the style of the source text and rules of the source language to make her translation "adequate".

Estep's Mistranslation
As was mentioned before, most of Espet's translation in Life tends to be "adequate", which means the general structure and style of her translation is symmetric with that of the source text. However, it is such adherence to the original sentence structure that leads to some of her mistranslations. For example: E.g.8: "离城还有十五里！咱跑了几回，看他们家里大人倒没啥意见，就是本人连一次面也不露。大概嫌咱没文化，脸黑。脸是没 人家白，论文化，他也和我一样，斗大字不识几升！唉，现在女的心都高了！" Estep's translation: "I've made the hour-long trek to see them in the city a few times, but the elder members of her family don't seem very enthusiastic about our match, and they haven't shown their faces around here even once. They probably think we're uncultured, with our dark skin. I'm darker than her, but as far as education goes, she's like me--she can't read much, but she's got a good heart!" Example 8 is Ma Shuan's response to Gao Jialin's question asking whether Ma Shuan's date with Liu Qiaozhen gets somewhere. Structurally these sentences parallel with the source one, but there are some imperfections and misunderstandings. In the source sentence, "离城还有十五里" is a Chinese colloquialism meaning something still gets off little ground, which means there are still lots of efforts to make before Ma Shuan gets Liu Qiaozhen's agreement to marry. In Estep's translation, "the hour-long trek" clearly shows that she literally understands this phrase as the distance from his home to Liu Qiaozhen's. Besides, "他们家大人倒没啥意见 " means Liu Qiaozhen's parents agree to marry their daughter to Ma Shuan, which is contrary to Estep's translation that Qiaozhen's family members are not enthusiastic about their marriage. "本人" is a pronoun of Liu Qiaozhen but not "they"---Qiaozhen's family members. Similarly, "咱" in the source sentence denotes Mashuan as compared with him; his interlocutor Gao Jialin was cultured. So Estep's adoption of the pronoun "we" is inaccurate. The clause "现在女的心都高了" indicates that Ma Shuan thinks Qiaozhen is quite demanding when choosing her husband, which means this phrase is a negative comment on women in that period. However, Estep here translated such connotation into a positive one, "good heart" praising someone is friendly and kind, which is not necessarily what the source text author wants to convey. Although Estep has tried to follow the Chinese language rules to make her translation "adequate", it is not strange that she still has some misunderstanding when translating, especially when there are lots of Shaanxi dialects in one paragraph, leading to some imperfections as such translation may get the target text readers to a wrong track in learning what the original author truly conveys in the source text.

Textual Analysis
Affected by initial and operational norms, Estep organized the whole book toward its "adequacy", including the segmentation and paratext of her translation.

Segmentation
Segmentation is a branch of matrical norms affiliated to Toury's operational norm, which mainly deals with segmenting translation into different chapters, sections, paragraphs, etc., compared with source text (Toury, 1995:59). Consider the number of chapters in Life; there are a total of 22. Just like what Estep pursuits in her lexical and syntactic translation, she also maintains the overall layout of her translated work. So she also organized 22 chapters in her translation. In terms of the matrix of sections and paragraphs, her translation is completely in line with the source work from the very beginning to the end, which further persuasively demonstrates that Estep has done what she can to make her translation "adequate" and the overall style of the original Chinese work has remained for target text readers.

Paratext
Toury asserted that the extent to which omissions, additions, changes of location and manipulations of segmentation are referred to in the translated texts(or around them) might also be determined by norms, even though the one can very well occur without the other (Toury, 1995:59). Thus it can be concluded that the paratext in translation is also governed by norms. In translation, paratext plays quite a significant role in that it, to some degree, reflects what the translator upholds and adopts during his translating.

(1)Cover and Forward
In terms of the cover, Estep's translated version is more colorful than the sourcebook. There is a hand holding a pair of chopsticks with a baozi and some bamboo leaves scattered around, which is full of vigor. Compared with the relatively monotonous layout of the sourcebook cover parallel with the hardships and difficulties suffered by the characters, Estep's designed cover seems to give readers a sense of rebirth and reinvigoration. To this point, the author thinks that the translated version emphasizes more on the smooth life after those hardships while the original version stresses that only through suffering can one live a better life. So both the two are in line with what the source book author truly wants to convey in Life. Besides, Estep included the recommendation of Jack Ma(founder and former CEO of Alibaba) and Jia Pingwa(author of Happy Dreams) though she omitted some content of their words, all of which demonstrates that Estep has tried to maintain the overall appearance of Life, so as to make her translation "adequate" both in form and content.
Estep has tried to retain all the components that appeared in the source book, including an aphorism written by Liu Qing before the forward. As for the forward, Estep added it written by Eric Abrahamsen to the beginning of the content. Abrahamsen's forward is similar to a book review summarizing the plot of Life and providing some background information behind the scene depicted in the book.

(2)Annotation
As the original book gives no annotation or notes, Estep's translation does not add them either. This is, on the one hand, her adherence to the "adequacy" of the translation; on the other hand, she has explained some hard-to-understand words and expressions through parenthesis during translating, so there is no need to further add annotation or notes.

Conclusion
Through systematic and detailed analysis, this paper studies the translation of Shaanxi dialect-featured literary works from the perspective of Gideon Toury's translation norms with Chinese writer Lu Yao's Life and its English translation by Chloe Estep as a study case, finding that Estep generally pursues "adequacy" of her translation when translating this dialect-featured work.
Governed by the principle of adequacy, Estep has tried to follow the source language rules in her translation though sometimes she also takes the target text readership into consideration. So when dealing with lexical dialects, Estep tries to find English equivalents for the nouns and verbs and adopts a free translation strategy for adjectives. In a syntactic aspect, Estep has done what she can to maintain the source sentence structures and features, which is the same as she does in dealing with the overall segmentation and layout of her translation though there are some imperfections in her translation except for those strategies and skills as a consequence of her misunderstanding caused by too many dialects.