A Comparative Study On Accessory Translation In Two Versions Of Hong Lou Meng

Hong Lou Meng is one of the four famous novels in ancient China. It has many selective translation versions and full translation versions in English, French, Russian and other dozens of languages. The paper is a research on the two most famous English versions of Hong Lou Meng. One is David Hawkes?s version The Story of the Stone which published in the UK. The other is Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang?s versions A Dream of Red Mansions.In Hong Lou Meng, the description of clothing, accessories, language, behavior characteristics of different social classes is accurate. And Cao Xueqin also carries out a detailed description for accessories of characters in this book. The form, process and pattern of accessories include deep Chinese culture. So this paper will do a comparative study of the accessory translation in the two versions. To study whether their translation of accessories can accurately spread the cultural connotation.This research will do a contrastive analysis from the perspective of Functional Equivalence Theory. Nida mentioned that meaning is the most important and form is the second. In literary translation, translators should reproduce the cultural connotation of the source language in the target language accurately. When there is a lot of cultural information in the original text, translators can use the method of annotation.Through the research and analysis, this paper arrives at a conclusion: most of the translations of Yang Xianyi and Hawkes are not rigidly adhere to the form of the accessories in original text. They make appropriate changes to show the specific pattern of accessories. And for accessories which have rich cultural connotation, translator should follow Functional Equivalence Theory in translation and try to understand the cultural background and specific knowledge of the source language. The method of annotation can be used to convey the cultural connotation.