The Translation Of Kinship Terms In "A Dream Of Red Mansions"

This paper is mainly about the translation of kinship terms in "A Dream of Red Mansions". The assessment is made on Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang's English version.The paper finds that translation of kinship terms is rather tough in that kinship terms are culture-specific, and thus great differences appear between English kinship terms and Chinese kinship terms, since both are part of their own language and culture.The translation of kinship terms is discussed in this paper mainly from cultural and pragmatic perspectives. The analysis covers the main differences of kinship terms between English and Chinese and with the analysis made, the paper assesses the efforts both Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang made in putting the kinship terms in "A Dream of Red Mansions" into English. The paper also agrees that the translation is a communicative process rather than a semantic one, and therefore, to the analysis of the kinship terms in Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang's version of "A Dream of Red Mansions", the paper applies the pragmatic approach by pointing out that the kinship terms belong to the address terms. In so doing, some pragmatic principles such as the deixis, the pragmatic meaning and the context are also applied.