A Study On David Hawkes’s Artistic Translation Of Speech Discourse In Hung Lou Meng

The author claims to have found, in the existing literature of translation criticism of Hung Lou Meng, an "Interpretive Violence", by which the translation critic, ignorant of his research object and its related time, culture, or social background, interprets the translation and translating behavior from his own cognitive perspective (Hung Tao,2010:64), thus leading to unreliable assumptions about the translation production under investigation. For the purpose of enabling a truthful description of translation-related phenomena, the author tries to seek an optimized way for translation criticism of Hung Lou Meng. This optimized approach, aiming to avoid any "Interpretive Violence", is designed to proceed in this way: Before undertaking the criticism, the critic needs to start from exploring the various editions of the original Hung Lou Meng that the translator refers to for translating. Then the critic ought to determine the intended meanings of linguistic expressions in the source text and those of the target text respectively, with such instrument as employed in Chinese traditional semantics(训诂学), in order to eliminate subjective judgment on the critic’s own part, and thereby to find out the semantic relationship between the source text and the target text and the translation strategy that the translator employed. In the end, by application of a descriptive paradigm, the translation critic needs to carry out an objective description of the translation strategy from the perspectives of linguistic norms, literary norms or models, and other contextual factors concerning the contemporary society, history, and translation subjects, etc., so as to reveal truthfully the art of translation of Hung Lou Meng. And throughout this process of description, the critic should keep on guard against any "Interpretive Violence".After warning translation critics against the potential "Interpretive Violence" and proposing an optimized method for translation criticism of Hung Lou Meng, the author explores David Hawkes’s art of translating the characters’ speeches in Hung Lou Meng. The author starts from discriminating the editions of the source texts that Hawkes referred to during his translation, which is key and top priority to translation criticism of Hung Lou Meng. After drawing conclusions on the ST edition, the author takes up an analysis of the translated speech discourse in David Hawkes’ version, which is the focus of discussion in this thesis. By analyzing David Hawkes’s translation art of speech discourse, the author finds out that David Hawkes, by manipulations at various levels of language, creates distinctive speech discourses in the target text that differ from those of the source text, but nevertheless achieves fidelity to the source text in a broader sense.In addition, by doing this research, the author hopes to demonstrate that a translation is a product that is constituted and informed by linguistic and literary norms, socio-cultural and socio-historical factors, etc. And so, translation critics ought to take into consideration a wide range of factors including society, culture, history, language, and literature, etc., to give an objective description of translation-related phenomena.