The paper is based on a historical study on translation in six early Republican Shanghai magazines. In an contextualizing and reconstructive effort, it maps out a shift in the norm governing textual relations between source text and target text during the first two decades of Republican China. This was a period of literary paradigmatic change, when the New Culture (xinwenhua) avant-garde advocated a rupture from the classical tradition and attempted to marginalize their contemporary popular (tongsu) literati, and when ideological issues were extensively discussed in the way of translating in literary journals. In the light of the conceptual framework of Toury’s norm (1995), the paper offers a close reading on the texts and extratexts of translation in the magazines in order to delineate how the tendency to arbitrarily betray the source text, a heritage from late-Qing translation practice among magazine translators, gave way to the principle of outright faithful rendering proposed by the avant-garde; and how the shift in norm interacted with the political and cultural tensions in the period. The fact that the popular literati, with full recognition of the new norm, continued to celebrate the late-Qing translation tradition in the 1920s implies that they identified more with the decanonized literary classics than to the New Culture tenets. Translation in early Republican magazines is thus presented as a dynamic arena where ideas of literary reforms were debated and tested.