On The Choice Of Cultural Translation Strategies

Hong Lou Meng has once been commented by a specialist of redology as an unprecedented "culture novel" of China, which is the greatest of all Chinese culture history. Along with the increase of intercultural communication among nations, the study of cultural differences has become a necessity. However, it also poses great difficulty for the translators when dealing with cultural elements. Until now, Hong Lou Meng has been translated into over fifteen different languages. Two complete English versions have become the most outstanding, popular and influential versions among them, namely, A Dream of Red Mansions by the famous Chinese Scholar Yang Xianyi and his wife Gladys Yang and The Story of the Stone by English sinologist David Hawkes and his son-in-law John Minford.This thesis makes a review on the relationships between culture and translations as well as the culture turn at home and abroad. This thesis attempts to discuss which the better choice is in rendering the culture specific items like Hong Long Meng by briefly presenting the definition of culture, relationships between culture and translation and the cultural turn in translation. Two main strategies are focused on by this thesis, which are frequently applied to deal with the cultural elements in translation which are called domestication and foreignization. Domestication refers to the target language oriented, including the adaptation of the cultural images as well as the syntactic structures in the source language to meet the requirements of the target readers. In contrast, foreignization is source language oriented, whose goal is to be as faithful as possible to the source language without changing the form and the style.Based on the comparative study the two English versions of Hong Lou Meng, the author of this thesis arrived at the conclusion that The Yangs'version is more inclined to employ foreignization while the Hawkes'is fond of domestication in most cases. Through the comparative study on different versions of a source text, it is beneficial to the career of translation, especially for the research on the translation skills and strategies. However, a simple answer of which is a better choice is not acceptable and scientific. The orientation of translations studies can not be represented by the application of single-handed domestication or foreignization. This thesis aims to add a piece of pactical analysis for research of the choices of cultural translation strategies.