Translation Of Hong Lou Meng: A Perspective Of Transfer Of Cultural Messages

Hong Lou Meng, one of the greatest Chinese classical works, is endowed richly with Chinese culture. How to translate it into English remains a challenge for translators. The history of the translation of Hong Lou Meng has covered a course of almost 160 years and has produced 9 versions. But it has not been so popular in the English world as in China. The reason mainly lies in the amount and degree of the transfer of the cultural messages in the English versions. It is well known that the more national flavor a literary work produces, the more securely a position the work will hold in the world literature. Therefore, the more Chinese flavor is preserved in the English versions, the more Chinese cultural messages will be transferred, consequently, the English readers will get more familiar with Hong Lou Meng, hence Chinese culture.Taking the two translated works of Hong Lou Meng—A Dream of Red Mansions translated by the couple of Yang Xianyi & Gladys Yang and The Slory of the Stone translated by David Hawkes & John Minford as examples, this thesis is an attempt to explore the translation of cultural elements in Hong Lou Meng. Because culture plays a very important role in translation, the author holds that translators should have a keen cultural awareness in translation by presenting some theoretical analysis and some specific examples. Two often-used translation strategies—domestication and foreignization in literary translation are discussed in detail in the second chapter. Disputes over domestication and foreignization have had a long history both in the history of translation in the West and in China, to begin with, at the linguistic level, then at the cultural level. Through the theoretical analysis, the author concludes that, in dealing with cultural factors in translation, it is better to adopt foreignization in order to transmit the source culture and enrich the target culture for the reason that it is a better way to keep the national flavor and a better way to absorb foreign cultures. On the basis of the theoretical analysis of domestication and foreignization in the second chapter, in the third chapter, taking examples from the two complete English versions—A Dream of Red Mansions and The Story of the Stone, the author makes detailed comparisons between these two versions in the translation of cultural elements in conversation, simile and metaphor and idioms through which the readers can find that the two translatorsadopt different translation strategies: roughly speaking, the Yangs mainly adopt the strategy of foreignization, i.e. the source culture-oriented, by which they keep the Chinese flavor as much as possible, thus transfer Chinese cultural messages to the greatest extent, while Hawkes mostly adopts that of domestication, i.e. target culture-oriented, by which he gives up so much Chinese flavor in order to fit in with the English customs, therefore, so much Chinese cultural messages get lost in his version. It is clear that translators should adopt the strategy of foreignization so as to transfer cultural massages to the largest degree for the sake of spreading the source language culture. Due to the great gap between Chinese and English in language and culture. cultural untranslatability often occurs, so the author also discusses the problem of translatability and that of untranslatability of cultural factors in translation in the third and the fourth chapters. Translatability is universal though there does exist cultural untranslatability. Translatability is a matter of degree. Cultural untranslatability can reflect in various aspects, such as ecological culture, material culture, social culture, religious culture and linguistic culture, etc.. But cultural untranslatabilty is not absolute, and it can be minimized by means of various translation techniques and methods. That is to say. cultural untranslatability is also a matter of degree, just as translatability. One of the best ways to overcome cultural untranslatability is literal translation with footnotes by which four purposes can be achieve...