A Study On The Color Word Hong (red) In The Two English Versions Of Honglou Meng

Honglou Meng is one of the most influential works in the Chinese literaturehistory. It was written in the mid eighteenth century and represents the highestachievement of the traditional novels. Times Higher Education Supplement regardsHonglou Meng as “one of those rare books that deepen one’s understanding of what itmeans to be human, that changes one’s view of life”(Zhuang,2004:1) This greatwork was written by Cao Xueqing, who was born in a large bureaucracy landlordfamily in Qing Dynasty. The Cao family lived a very luxury life when Cao Xueqinwas young. But he had suffered a great bitterness of the world since the Cao familywent to decline. Among Honglou Meng’s English versions, the most complete andfar-reaching works are A Dream of Red Mansion from couple Yang Xianyi and TheStory of the Stone from David Hawkes.Some scholars believed that the book Honglou Meng includes the largest amountof color words in all Chinese novels. There is no doubt that the word “red” is the coreword in this book. In original text, the positive meaning of red is quite obvious.However, Hawkes and Yang Xianyi had taken very different translation strategies indealing with those cases which are attached to Chinese culture. It will be analyzed inthis thesis.The first chapter is a brief introduction of the book Honglou Meng, the writerCao Xueqin and the two English versions from Hawkes and Yang Xianyi. The secondchapter is a brief literature review of research status and theories review. The authorhad compared Xin-Da-Ya translation theory and traditional translation theory, literaltranslation and free translation, domestication and foreignization in this chapter. Thethird chapter analyzed of the importance of color words in literature, the definition ofred and especially the differences of the meaning of “red” between Chinese andwestern cultures. In chapter four, the author divided the232data into several groupssuch as names, appeal, diet, expressions, idioms and so on. In each group, the authorwould pick some typical examples to compare the different translation strategy. Theauthor intends to study the translation strategies and methods of the color word hong (red) from the perspective of deconstruction translation theory and also shows variousways of expressing the same word from the translation of the two great translatorswhich is helpful to English readers to study the word expression and appreciate thenovel better.