Idiom Renditions In Hong Lou Meng--A Hermeneutic Account

Hermeneutics is the subject of understanding and interpreting, which are inevitable in every act of translation. George Steiner's hermeneutic motion narrates from a translator's perspective the translating process and explains the universality of understanding and interpreting. Thus it provides translation studies, including my thesis I hope, with the philosophical basis.With hermeneutic interpretation on meaning and its emphasis on the interpretive use of language, the author studies different renditions of idioms in Hong Lou Meng . My data are from either the translations done by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang or by David Hawks or from both versions put side by side. For the convenience in my analysis I roughly put the idioms chosen for observation in two big categories-denotation and connotation, which I further put into nine categories. They are 1) idioms with religious allusions; 2) idioms with historic connotations; 3) idioms related to customs; 4) idioms with literary references; 5) idioms from tales and legends; 6) idioms with value judgments; 7) idioms related to human feelings, 8) renditions of myth, and 9) idioms loaded with symbolic meanings. By observing these renditions, the author would like to answer such questions as what sort of changes the translators have made to the source text and what affects different translations. Can interpretive translation account for translations that have to cope with rich cultural connotations? With these in mind, the author further argues that although hermeneutic approach does not tend to give guidelines for translators, it provides a license, so to speak, for translators in terms of their choice for different translation strategies. Therefore, the accountability of translation can be best explained through hermeneutics.