Aesthetic Loss And Compensation In Translating Biographical Names In David Hawkes' Version Of The Story Of The Stone

Everyone has his/her name. Biographical names are not only a kind of symbols which represent individuals, but also a kind of culture. They are simple in form but profound in meaning. Novels are"derivatives"of human culture, stories about human beings. Therefore, novels can not be novels without characters. But as long as there are characters, there should be biographical names to distinguish one from another. In literary works, biographical names suggest characters'personalities, imply characters'fates, reveal literary works'themes and create ironic effects. They play a significant part in aesthetic values of literary works.Hong Lou Meng is a representative work of classical Chinese novels. In the book, there are various kinds of people. Cao Xueqin, the language master, makes full use of the richness of Chinese characters in sound, form and meaning to entitle people in Hong Lou Meng with unique names. However, this uniqueness poses great problems to the translation of the book. Due to the differences between Chinese and English, the aesthetic information of the biographical names in Hong Lou Meng at phonetic, lexical and semantic levels can not be reproduced when translated from Chinese to English. There is unavoidable aesthetic loss. But a look at the names in David Hawkes'version, it is not difficult to find that the translator applies effective methods to compensate the loss in sound, form and meaning.The thesis is divided into five chapters.Chapter One introduces the main functions and importance of biographical names in literary works, both Chinese and foreign, and points out that translation of biographical names is an indispensable part of translation of literary works.Chapter Two introduces the main methods of translating biographical names in literary works, namely, transliteration, transliteration plus annotation, semantic translation and combination of semantic translation and transliteration.Chapter Three classifies the biographical names in Hong Lou Meng into several groups and explains their features.Chapter Four analyzes the aesthetic loss of biographical names in translation from three aspects, sound, form and meaning. Chapter Five applies Professor Xu Yuanchong's"three transformations"method to analyze the compensation methods David Hawkes adopts when translating the biographical names in Hong Lou Meng.