An Analysis Of The Story Of The Stone Translated By David Hawkes

Born in a big landlord family of a hundred—year history, Cao Xueqin, who created this pinnacle of the classical Chinese novels after he suffered the bitterness caused by his family's decline. He deeply recognized the fickleness of the world, and got more sober understandings of the society and life. Hongloumeng one of the greatest novels of Chinese literature, costs Cao Xueqin decades for rereading and five times'rewriting, which is a masterpiece of Chinese vernacular literature and one of China's Four Great Classical Novels. As one of the four great ancient classical novels, Hongloumeng depicts the true reality of life at his time. It is not only a microcosm of the landscape, but also of the spiritual and cultural states of the whole society.Hongloumeng is regarded as a piece of encyclopedic work, which includes varieties of elements such as religions, politics, cultures and social life, etc. Such a great work, which can truly be world widely recognized by most foreign readers and scholars; its success should attributed to the popularization of its English versions.So far, the literary translation criticisms of English versions of Hongloumeng are still hot points, especially of The Story of the Stone that translated by David Hawkes.Currently, the literary translation criticisms of Hawkes'English version of Hongloumeng mainly focus on his over usage of domestication of foreign texts. They hold that such strategy makes the version have too many unfaithful translations from the source language and its culture.This thesis is theoretically based on American translation theorist Lawrence Venutis'cultural translation principles. From the culture-exchanging angle, the thesis analyses and researches the translation strategies that Hawkes adopted when translating the characters'names and appellations, poems and religious cultures of the original texts. Through these analyses the thesis tries to find out the deep cultural reasons why Hawkes'English version of Hongloumeng is so controversial, in order to reveal that cultural differences have very important and deep effects on the literary translation and the integration of global culture.The thesis consists of three parts: introduction, the main body and conclusion. The introduction offers a brief survey of the study on the works, the approaches the author resorts to, the main translation principles, the purpose, the innovation and the significance of this thesis.The second part is the main body comprised of three chapters.Chapter One generally introduces the original story and its cultural influence and literature status, its author—Cao Xueqin, and the English version by David Hawkes.Hongloumeng is a masterpiece of Chinese vernacular literature and one of China's Four Great Classical Novels. It is a piece of encyclopedic work that includes varieties of cultural elements such as religions, politics, cultures and social life, etc. It is just these cultural elements that results into the difficulty in translation. The English version by David Hawkes is considered to be the best English version of Hongloumeng abroad.The great feature of this version is that it crosses cultural boundaries and presents it to British people in British original flavor. To readers, it's pleasant to read his version. There are many creative movements during the reading. However, there many literary critics hold that Hawkes used too much domestication of foreign texts, which leads too much unfaithful translation of the source language and its original cultures. This thesis reanalyses Hawkes'version based on Venuti's cultural translation principles and, from the culture-exchanging angle, reveals that cultural differences are the deep reason why this version is so controversial and also reveals the great effect of cultural differences on literary translation, cultural exchange and the integration of global culture.Chapter Two is mainly the analysis on Hawkes'version under the Venuti's cultural translation principles. The analysis can be mainly divided into four parts: domestication and poetry translation, foreignization and the translation of names and appellations, cultural acceptance and language features and the ethics of translation and religious cultures.There are abundant beautiful poems in Hongloumeng. These poems are not only the expression of the characters'talents, but also the essential part across the whole book. What is more important is that these beautiful poems have deeply implied meanings, as these poems imply different characteristics of the characters and the developments of their fates. Thus, the importance and significance of these poems are as a matter of course. Hawkes adopted domestication to translate these poems, In order to create the aesthetic feelings of meter of the English poetry.Although these techniques led to many unfaithful translations of the original texts both on the syntax and the meter, it makes the most efficient translation for the readers who do not understand Chinese and never read the original text. Some of his rewritten translation gives the same feelings to foreign readers who could not understand the artistic conception of the Chinese classic poetry. This is the unique feature of Hawkes'version.Most of the other versions of Hongloumeng adopt liberal translation to translate the characters'names and appellations. The effects of this technique seem nondescript and puzzled. This kind of translation cannot convey the ideas intended. However, in Hawkes'version, he comprehensively utilized domestication and foreignization in translating the characters''names and appellations. He translated the names and appellations according to different implicit meaning and status of the characters. Therefore Hawkes'translation is much more conforms much more to the essence of the original texts.In the process of culture exchanging, the final purpose of literary translation is try to make the literary treasures of the source language acceptable by the target language readers. Then it comes down to the problem of cultural acceptance under Venuti's cultural translation principles. The most successful aspect of Hawkes'version is that the language he used mostly rather conforms to the language usage of English-using countries.Since that culture has its own period features in different periods. Each time's culture has its unique characteristics. The translator must think over the readers'recipient, abilities and their tastes, i.e. the time's historical and cultural backgrounds of its time. To recognize this, it is not difficult for us to understand why Hawkes made some rewriting and recreation during his translation. Those treatments make his version much more suitable for the flavor and the appreciation values of that time's target language, and it's more beneficial for the spread of versions under that cultural atmospheres at that time.The most controversial part of Hawkes'version is that he chose foreignization strategy to translate the religious cultures in the original texts. There is no doubt to that this is the vital failure of this version. However, back to Hawkes'times, the target-language people had very strong and stubborn rejection to foreign religious beliefs. The phenomenon that people generally reject to different views existed in that times'western countries, which was called"the scandal of translation"by Venuti.The third chapter goes to the discussion of the vital significance of the reanalysis on Hawkes'English version The Story of the Stone under the Venuti's cultural translation principles to the culture exchanges and the integration of global culture.Hongloumeng, such a magnificent novel of Chinese literature can really get out of the"country gate"and is recognized and be accepted by foreign literary circles and literary critics. Its success is no doubt attributed to great English versions translated by various translators. As the most commonly-used international language, English is the firstly-chosen from the target languages in literary translations. However, there are great cultural differences between the English-speaking countries and eastern countries, especially China a country with an ancient civilization. These great cultural differences make literary translation much more difficult and also lead to a lot of controversial issues of different versions of literary works. Then so many translation principles and strategies are used, such as domestication and foreignization, functional equivalence theory and so on. However, translation is not only the simple mutual-transformation and communication method between different languages, but what's more is that it is the main vital medium of communication, mutual-understanding and integration between different cultures. Translation ought to be a kind of two-way exchange, a kind of equal conversation and mutual-understanding and cooperation. When doing translation work, translators must fully understand the cultural differences between the source language and the target language, in order to avoid the misunderstanding and ambiguities caused by cultural differences. And translators must also fully recognize the huge direct effects on cultural differences to the qualities of versions and their spared effects.Similarly, when doing translation critics, especially literary critics, one must fully realize the influences of cultural-differences on a version from culture exchanging angle. It is rather important to judge the value of a version from a over-rounded objective way, instead of commenting on the translator's purpose only from whether the translation is faithful to the source language and its culture or not. That's the important guiding significance of the analysis of Hawkes'English version under the Venuti's cultural translation principles on the literary translation criticism. The third part is the conclusion.The conclusion is to make a generalization of the whole thesis, and at the same time clearly points out the breakthrough made on the basis of the materials and academic studies by previous scholars and critics as well as the significances and value of the thesis in modern society.