Culture Evaporation And Compensation--With Special References To David Hawkes's The Story Of The Stone

Cultural translation has been one of the hot issues in translation studies these years. This paper mainly discusses the problem of how cultural elements evaporate and get compensated in the process of translating.Translation is an intercultural communicative activity. Hence, a loyal representation of the cultural content of the source text is one of its leading tasks. However, owing to cultural discrepancies, including linguistic ones, some cultural elements are extremely difficult to translate and thus easily evaporate in translating, resulting in a semantic loss on different types of meanings. This paper, set in a semiotic pattern of meaning, analyzes cultural evaporation occurring on three types of meanings, i.e. referential, intralinguistic and pragmatic meanings.Unavoidable as cultural evaporation might be, there are still some techniques to compensate this loss. Based on David Hawkes's translation of The Story of the Stone, the author mainly describes six most common skills, they are: 1) substitution; 2) annotation; 3) paraphrasing; 4) approximation; 5) variation; 6) transliteration.Examples of this paper mainly come from D David Hawkes's translation of "Hong Lou Meng", The Story of the Stone. The reason is evident: "Hong Lou Meng", as one of the four Chinese classics, is in itself a small encyclopaedia of Chinese culture. The translation of such a novel will certainly witnesses many cases of cultural evaporation. However, Hawkes's version also enjoys great repute among both Chinese and English readers. Hence, it is also a good example of cultural compensation.