A Study Of Onomatopoeia And Its Translation In Hongloumeng

This dissertation explores the 106 onomatopoeic words with 276 occurrences in theChinese classic Honloumeng. An exhaustive survey is made in their phonological, semanticand grammatical features and their contextual attributes, with whose help a comparison ismade of the best two English translations by Yang Xianyi and David Hawkes respectively.It is proposed here that onomatopoeia traces back its original lexical motivation fromsound to meaning, on which basis onomatopoeic words are thus grouped. Onomatopoeicwords are a group of words with common semantic features rather than a part of speech ingrammar. Onomatopoeic words tend to imitate not copy the sounds with phonologicalrestrictions in a certain language, hence are language specific.The analysis reveals that these 106 words are typical in terms of phonology, acousticsimilarity and grammatical function. They cover most of the initial consonants and vowelsin Modern Chinese. Initial consonants d, h, l are the most frequent; while vowels i, u, ang,eng are in highest frequency. The most common morphological structures are Model A andModel AB. These words imitate sounds made by human activities as well as those causedby daily utensils including furniture and garments, animal sounds and sounds by othernatural phenomenon as rain or wind. The words in discussion are used in narrative text andpoems, functioning most commonly as predicates, as well as subjects, objects, adverbials,complements, etc. The onomatopoeias enhance the rhetorical effects of the language andcontribute to the novel's success.Similarities and differences in translation approaches are revealed by a comparisonbetween the two translated versions, i.e. A Dream of the Red Mansions by Yang Xianyi &Gladys Yang and The Story of the Stone David Hawkes & John Minford. In both of the twoversions, the translators approach these figurative words by finding equivalentonomatopoeias, compensating, creating, and omitting. In A Dream of the Red Mansions thetranslators mainly resort to the ready English onomatopoeia, while in The Story of the Stonethe translators create a dozen new sound forms to convey the original Chineseonomatopoeia. David Hawkes and John Minford try every means to comply with theChinese rhyme in translating the poems in the novel. In the two English versions the translators artfully polish their language by adding onomatopoeias in certain places.