Style, Skopos, Ideology And Cross-Cultural Construction Of Poetic Meanings

1970s witnesses the fundamental cultural turn in translation studies, which involves the consideration of cultural paradigms, and thereby, of their mutual relevance. This consideration, however, has its constructive motive mainly from the inclusion of the cultural turn, the theoretical insights and the integrated approaches of scholarly endeavors. The common theoretical interests lie in the following two beliefs. One is that, rather than a simply static product of verbal text, the translation activity has been viewed as the dynamic process of cross-cultural communication, which enables translation studies to focus on all the textual and extratextual constraints on translator who is both the receiver of the ST and the producer of the TT through his or her subjectivity, and especially on those constraints of socio-cultural situation of translation—initiator's needs, predefined intention, and the like. The other is that, not confined to a single word or sentence, the study of the original and the target have been conducted on the level of text, which focuses on the high relevance between the context of situation and the realization of text functions. In a word, since the translator enjoys greater subjectivity in the cross-cultural communication of translation, different translators and translational situations result in different decisions in translation.With the above beliefs in mind, this thesis is committed to a cntrastive study of the two English versions of Hongloumeng by David Hawkes (The Story Of the Stone, London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1986) and by Yang Xianyi & Gladys Yang (A Dream of Red Mansions, Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1995) respectively, concerning their translations of verses as cases in point. By the empirically descriptive study of the cross-cultural construction of poetic meanings in translation process, in terms of the register configuration (field, tenor, and mode), translation skopos (determined mainly by the expectation of intended target readers as well as the initiator's needs), translator's individual ideology and the dominant ideology of the society where translation takes place, this thesis aims to examine how the above factors engender poetic meanings, to...