On Translating Cultural Contents Of Poetry In Honglou Meng

It has been generally accepted that translation is not only a cross-language activity, but also a cross-cultural activity. But the conflict between the original author and the target reader, and that between the source and the target language remain there. How to resolve the conflicts is still open to different translators under different situations. Against the backdrop of an unprecedented quick speed of globalization and cultural integration, it is every translator's responsibility to respect and maintain ethnical cultures so as to carry on diversification and multiculturalism. Translating of Chinese classics should, therefore, be made in the spirit of preserving and introducing Chinese cultural sense and heritage. Yet how to maintain the source language cultural peculiarity in translation? This thesis aims to answer the question through a comparative study of cultural Contents translation of poetry in the classical Chinese novel, Honglott Meng. It has been translated by two renowned translators, namely David Hawkes and Yang Xianyi with two contrastive translation strategies, foreignization and domestication. We shall see through case studies that Yang, regarding preserving and introducing Chinese cultural heritage his purpose, adopted more semantic, documentary and source culture oriented translation; while Hawkes, with a purpose of pleasing the target reader, adopted more communicative, instrumental and target culture-oriented translation. We can also see that Yang's translation, as a whole, proves better in maintaining specific Chinese cultural characteristics than Hawkes' translation. The thesis thus concludes that for better preserving and dissimilating the source language cultural peculiarity and heritage to the target reader, the strategy of foreignization or alienation works better.