On The Strategies For Cultural Image Translation In Hong Lou Meng

Hong Lou Meng is among the greatest classics in the literary treasury of the world. As the epitome of the feudal Chinese society, it boasts of rich and enormous life and cultural contents, extraordinary depth of thoughts, highly skilled and consummate writing skills, and unique artistic and aesthetic values. All this, however, poses great challenges to translators. In terms of cultural elements, quite different translating methods are employed to render them.This paper is an attempt at exploring the validity of the strategies for translating cultural images in Hong Lou Meng with reference to Ys' and H's versions. To begin with, the concept of "cultural image" is presented in terms of its definition, forms of expression and characteristics, and the phenomenon of "discrepancy of cultural images" is illustrated through examples. Then, in Part 2, the two main translating strategies, namely, foreignization and domestication, are briefly reviewed and, in Part 3, Ys' and H's main strategies for translating cultural images in Hong Lou Meng, are exemplified and compared. Next, Part 4 justifies the duality of the two strategies, and in Part 5, a holistic investigation is conducted to demonstrate the precedence of foreignization to domestication in the translation of cultural images in Hong Lou Meng. This paper concludes with a general principle proposed for translating cultural images in Hong Lou Meng: Adopting foreignization as the main strategy and domestication as the supplementary. On the one hand, we had better employ foreignization if at all possible rather than rejecting it without trying; on the other hand, we can retreat tactically to domestication in too demanding cases so as not to outsmart ourselves.