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nal andregarding translation as a cross-cultural activity.Apart from the exploration of Goldblatt’s translating ideas, case studies onGoldblatt’s translated works done from different perspectives to discuss thetranslation strategies and problems abound, such as the study from culturalperspective--Cultural Misreading in Literary Translation-A Case Study of RedSorghum(《从葛浩文英译<红高粱>看文学翻译中的文化误读》) by Hu Yuan(胡湲，2008),A Study on the Variations in the English Version of Lang Tu Teng (《<狼图腾>英译本变异现象的文化透视》)by Ming Haiying (明海英，2010), to name a few. From linguisticperspective, we have A Stylistic Approach to the Translation: Life and Death AreWearing Me Out (<生死疲劳>英译本文学文体学翻译研究) by Li Yanxia (李颜霞，2012).Lv Minhong’s A Narratological Study on Howard Glodblatt’s Translation of ModernChinese Novel (《葛浩文小说翻译叙事研究》)is the first work to study Goldblatt’stranslation from narratological perspective, an important supplement to the study ofGoldblatt’s translation from the literary aesthetic perspective. (吕敏宏，2011)Goldblatt once revealed his views on translation in the article The Writing Life(Goldblatt, 2002) published on The Washington Post in a systematic way which canbe summarized as follows: first, he regards translation as an activity of cross-culturalcommunication, that is, the primary function of translation is to bring new ideas fromthe foreign. Also, he considers faithfulness for the original text as the most importantprinciple for translation but he also points out that considering the difference betweenEnglish and Chinese, absolute fidelity would be impossible to reach; therefore, tosome extent, translation is also betrayal. Last but not least, always bearing theresponsibility for the target readers in mind, Goldblatt thinks that translation is alsorewriting, implying that variations are inevitable when a language is being translatedinto another different one.1.4 The Concept and the Development of Translation NormsThe notion “norms” originates from sociology and develops during the processof actual socialization. Bartsch in his Norms of Language defines norms as ‘the socialreality of correctness notions’, implying it is a knowledge to tell people what to doand what not to do and to help evaluate the appropriateness of people’s behavior.(Bartsch，1987: xii)According to Ji í Levy, who first introduced the concept of norm in 1960s,translation involves a series of steps, each including “one choice from among a set ofalternative possibilities” and the translator is a decision-making agent, both culturallyand historically (1967:1172-1182). The totality “of decisions, and of alternativesconsidered and rejected determines the final shape of the translated text” (Hermans，2004:73) Then what leads the translators to prefer certain choices to others? Theanswer gave by Anton Popovic with reference to Levy is that translators areconfronted with two sets of norms, respectively those residing in the source text andthose prevailing in the target culture, or “in that section of the target culture where thetranslator hopes to make impact.” (Popovic，1970:79) That is to say, translators willbe in favor of one option rather than another since they are aware of the certaindemands, preferences or expectations existing in the target audience they areaddressing. They would gather such kind of information from the reception of theprevious translated works and summarize the regular patterns established across arange of texts.Norms are the important objects of d