A Narratological Study Of Yang Xianyi And Gladys Yang's English Translation Of Hong Lou Meng

Equivalence, a criterion of evaluating the translation, has long been widely accepted by translation theorists. When aiming at reproducing the closest natural equivalent of the original, a translator must strive to avoid the appearance of deceptive–equivalence (which refers to the phenomenon that translation conveys approximately the same fictional"facts"but fails to capture the aesthetic effects in the original) in literary translation. Besides transferring the content of the original, therefore, the translator should take into account the narrative techniques of the original with a view to better representing the aesthetic value of the original.Narratology is a theoretical discipline that studies narrative structure and discourse. With novel as its main genre, it generalizes narrative form, nature, function, mode, tense and voice of novel. In accordance with related requirements of narratology, the translator has to catch hold of the aesthetic function of narrative techniques and accurately reproduce narrative types in the original so as to make it an ideal to connect Chinese translation to Western one. In the past few years the scholars at home and abroad have shown great interest in the forms and techniques of the novel, and an increasing number of academic works have investigated narrative structure and narrative mode. It is a popular way of interpreting and an effectively innovative approach to analyze the novel from the perspective of narrative theory.The novel Hong Lou Meng, a masterpiece of the narrative works in the history of Chinese literature, unveils the complex and complicated relationship among characters, typical image and the outline of the story before the readers by using the narrative methods of the spatiotemporal interaction and the clever and careful net-like structure. At that time, the authors of the novel basically adopted omniscient focalization and direct speech almost became the only means of narrated speech in the Chinese vernacular novels. This paper will choose some typical examples from HLM and Yang Xianyi and his wife Gladys Yang's translated version to analyze whether the translation recreates narrative perspectives and modes of speech of the original correctly as well as to explore how to set off the theme and aesthetic value of the original in the translation and the significance of accurate translation.The research showed that Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang faithfully reproduced the traits of creation and of narrative in doing the translating of HLM. At the same time, they flexibly altered modes of narrative and ways of speech, thus effectively strengthening the meaning of theme and aesthetic value of the original; afterwards, the thesis found that the translator can convey narrative characteristics of the novel correctly in translation and avoid deceptive equivalence effectively on the basis of understanding them fully.