A Study Of The Cultural Imagery Translation Of Hong Lou Meng's Poetry

Poetry is an integral part of Hong Lou Meng, playing an indelible role in developing the plot and shaping the main characters'images, thus it is of a very high literary value. Hong Lou Meng's poetry is abundant in cultural imagery, which is the soul of poetry. Therefore, this thesis, under the premise of Palmer's culture linguistics, compares the two complete English versions of Hong Lou Meng, one by Yang Xianyi and his wife Gladys Yang and the other by David Hawkes and his son-in-law John Minford, by focusing on the cultural imagery translation of its poetry and verses.This thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter serves as an introduction, introducing the research background and structure of this study. The second chapter introduces Hong Lou Meng and its English versions, illustrates the importance and features of its poetry and gives out the theoretical framework of this paper. The third chapter analyzes cultural imagery in Hong Lou Meng's poetry under five categories:the dragon and phoenix images, gold and jade images, ice, snow and frost images, plants images, and allusions images. The fourth chapter gives a comparative analysis of imagery translation of the two complete versions from three perspectives: images with equivalent cognition, images with different cognition, and images with default cognition. And the fifth chapter summarizes the findings and limitations of this thesis. It can be found that two translators are not the same in imagery translation, but they share in common their respect and loyalty to the original works and Chinese culture, the same solemn work attitude, and their painstaking effort made in retaining the original cultural meanings and their contribution to spreading Chinese culture.