| The famous full-length novel Hong Lou Meng, written by Cao Xueqin in Qing Dynasty is one of four masterpieces in our ancient times. It is known as a great masterpiece with a strong ideological content and a high artistic quality, among which ancient poems of diversity are indispensable for the whole book and they own a resplendent artistic value. Since the 19th century. Hong Lou Meng, this literary treasure has been translated into many languages and has been widely spread into the whole world. Two most effective complete versions were produced in 1970s, which were Yang Xianyi and Dai Naidie's version, short for Yang's version, and David Hawkes'version, short for Hawkes'version.In the early and middle stage of 20th century, essays concerning poems in HLM (being short for Hong Lou Meng) were rare and until 1970s. they began to come out with many monographs as well,which showed the origin, implicature. characteristics, functions and literary theory of HLM. In recent years, the translational researches on Poems of Hong Lou Meng are mainly from the following angles:the analysis of the meta-functions. the transfer of metaphors in poems, the alienation translation of metaphors and theme in poems etc. Some scholars have studied the style transference of poems from diverse aspects, like from the relative equivalence aspect, from relevance theory aspect, from Liu Miqing's style semiotic system aspect, from German functional translation aspect and etc.This research makes a comparative analysis of poems in HLM on style translation based on "Three Beauties" theory and assisted by parallel corpus.It mainly discusses the differences between Yang's version and Hawkes'version on style translation in different culture background, aiming to clarify some elements that need paying attention to and analyze how style can be translated so as to prove its translatability. Besides, the former studies on HLM are mainly focused on qualitative research, while this thesis combines both qualitative research and a certain quantitative research. The original poems in HLM and its two versions are the corpus. First of all, the style of the original text is identified and classified, and then an analysis of two versions from Three Beauties perspective is shown. After applying SPSS, study shows which version reserved the original style better and achieved the relative equivalence.Xu Yuanchong is a famous translator who has made a great contribution to literary translation for our country. Meanwhile, he has also achieved great attainments in translation theory and "Three Beauties" is one of them. The reason why the author selected "Three Beauties" as the theoretical guidance is that the characteristics of beauty of sense,sound and form can be used in translation especially for poetry translation and this is also Xu Yuanchong's originality. Poetry stresses sense, which can touch readers'hearts, therefore, sense is the fountain and the corner stone of reproducing the original poems.The main inspiration of theoretical structure originates from a thesis entitled: Relative Equivalence in The Inter-Translation Between English and Chinese Poems by Qu Lili,and this thesis employed the concept of Relative Equivalence on the basis of Nida's Functional Equivalence and provided it more connotation. Now, the concept can be employed in this thesis in the translation of Hong Lou Meng. Eugene A. Nida proposed the famous Dynamic Equivalence Theory, in which he indicated that translation was to reproduce the information of the original text from semantics to style by applying the most proper, natural and equivalent language.This thesis selects the original poems in HLM Parallel Corpus and its two English versions as objects of study, aiming to show the investigation, analysis and study of the differences on style translation in two English versions and to explore how the degree of relative equivalence on style translation of poems can be improved from the perspective of "Three Beauties" From study methodology, the thesis can be roughly divided into qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis.Qualitative analysis is mainly adopted in the former part of the thesis.First of all,functions of original poems in HLM are elaborated and its style is identified in introduction part. The author views that three characteristics have been emerged on style of poems in HLM:one is the diverse poetic forms and rhetorical device, narrative features of the poems and the melancholy emotional style.Meanwhile, the author comes up with the basic procedure and the research questions.The study focus is to search for the answers to the following two questions:1) Which English version of Hong Lou Meng relatively transferred the original style of the masterpiece from the angle of Xu Yuanchong's Three Beauties?2) What should be considered in order to achieve the relative equivalence of poetry translation?In qualitative analysis, the thesis selects about 30 original poems in HLM and its English versions to make a specific study and an analysis from lexical aspect, syntactical aspect and textual aspect and for each aspect. Xu Yuanchong's "Three Beauties" theory is adopted to make a comparison about the translation situations of the two English versions.Quantitative analysis which choosing 60 poems with 30 poems of qualitative analysis included is at the end of each part of sense beauty, sound beauty and form beauty by applying SPSS system as assistance,thus the differences of Yang's version and Hawkes' version on images and sound can be expressed directly by statistics.On the whole, study has been manifested that there are mainly three reasons that cause the differences of Yang's and Hawkes" versions:diverse cultural background, personal differences and purpose of translation. From cognitive thinking level. Chinese and English develop in different cultural background,thus the language system with vocabulary, semantics and syntax included is different. Then, on personal differences. David Hawkes is a British Sinologist and Yang Xianyi is the famous translator in China, thus their thinking modes are formed in different culture. Therefore, their understandings of Chinese classic novels may be different. Finally, on purpose of translation, Yang Xianyi aims to propagate the Chinese culture to foreigners while Hawkes spares no effort to reduce the reading barrier of foreigners to understand Chinese profound masterpiece.The results of qualitative analysis indicate that:first, on the lexical level, when translating vacancy of words and words with different associative meanings, Yang's translations are more integrated and comparatively better on beauty of conception. On beauty of sound reproduction, an excellent translator should transform the source sound style into the pattern that target readers can appreciate and acquire. Both Yang's version and Hawkes" version apply their particular method to keep the original style. Third, beauty of form should not be ignored as well during translation. Yang's version pays less attention to numbers of syllables in poetic lines compared to Hawkes'tidy lines. Second, in syntactical aspect, specific comparisons around grammatical level and rhetorical level are launched. Specifically, on grammatical level, the noun-form poems are well reserved in Yang's version in order to follow the source text, while Hawkes* version tends to employ many verbs, which enables the couplet more detailed and complete. And similarly, both Yang and Hawkes'versions applied subject supplement. On rhetorical level. Yang's version comparatively reserves the original rhetorical devices like simile, metaphor and allusion while Hawkes'version is better in adding appendix to solve pun translation.Through the SPSS system, quantitative analysis in the textual level showed:in the 60 poems selected from Hong Lou Meng, words in Yang's and Hawkes* versions are more than the original, and Yang's version owns the most. In addition,492 images are portrayed in the Yang's version and 408 images in Hawkes'. so Yang" s version is closer to the original style. On beauty of sound, Hawkes'more attention is paid to rhyme, and the rhyme rate up to 96.7%in Hawkes'version is better to achieve the style of poetry translation than Yang's version up to 73.3%. For four lines of poetry translation, there are also some differences on rhyme form:the frequency of type "abab" used by Yang is obviously higher than type "aabb" while Hawkes tends to use type "aabb". On beauty of sound, Hawkes'is superior. On beauty of form. Yang's version is less superior to Hawkes'in uniformity, which is identical to the former qualitative analysis.In order to achieve the relative equivalence in poetry translation, firstly, conception attaches the most importance to keep the original style, therefore, trying to reserve images or conceptions as many as the original text are an effective way. And the degree of translation is supposed to be focused on for too much domestication translation, though it enables readers to understand foreign culture better, ignores some original taste to some extent, and thus fails to propagate foreign traditional culture. In sound translation, rhymes and syllables play an important role all the time, namely, during translation, translators need to apply certain rhymes according to the rhyme style in original poems. Concerning syllables, the poem seems to be tidy if the number of syllables of each line stays the same. In beauty of form, reserving the original literary appearance in translation is pretty significant. That means if the original poem is an ancient form, then your version is supposed to be formally assimilated. Due to the time and level limitation, there are still some shortcomings and imperfections in this study, e.g.60 poems selected cannot fully stand for the original. This thesis tries to compare and analyze translation style of two versions from Xu Yuanchong's "Three Beauties" perspective.The author believes that it is also possible to studv from other views.In addition, idea of this thesis is from microcosmic vocabulary to macroscopical chapters, but a deeper level such as other aspects of human thinking can also be more far-reaching study.This thesis needs further modifying and any suggestion is appreciated.
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