The Translation Strategies Of Religious Culture In Hongloumeng-From The Perspective Of Cultural Message Transfer

Hongloumeng is generally considered as the greatest masterpiece of traditional Chinese literature and a cherished classic of world literature. Not only endowed with tremendous thought-provoking values, this novel has also attained superb artistic achievements and is regarded as an"encyclopedia"of Chinese feudal society. It covers nearly all the cultural aspects of Chinese society, including social order, political system, cultural values, social convention, religion, philosophy, gender norms, family life, clothing and house wares, architecture and landscaping, calligraphy, painting, poetry, allusion, medicine. The novel is a reflection of Chinese aesthetics and worldview, the culmination of China's rich literal tradition. It sheds light on virtually every aspects of both elite and popular culture. It is a great wonder in Chinese literal history. Hongloumeng has been translated into various versions in twenty-seven languages since it was finished writing by Cao Xueqin and Gao E more than 200 years ago. Up to now, there are nine versions in the English language. Among the nine versions, the two best-known are A Dream of Red Mansions translated by Yang Xianyi and his wife Gladys Yang, the renowned translators in contemporary China, and The Story of the Stone by the British sinologist David Hawkes and his son-in-law John Minford.Ever since the appearances of A Dream of Red Mansions and The Story of the Stone, there appeared extensive studies on these two versions, including numerous journal articles and academic degree dissertations. Most of these articles and dissertations are studying and comparing these two English versions from different perspectives. However, up to now these articles and dissertations mainly study the translation of poetry and lyrics, cultural content, book title, language of the characters in the book, aphorisms and idioms, the title of the chapters, the names of the characters and so on. Among the studies of translation of cultural content, researchers mainly focus on the translation of ecological culture, social culture, historical culture and linguistic culture. They overlook one important cultural element—religious culture, which is of great significance in Hongloumeng. Cao Xueqin employed religious culture as an assistant artifice to scheme the whole book, which is one of its excellent artistic achievements. The famous translator Nida classifies the cultural elements involved in translation to five categories, which include religious culture. Religious culture, as a social cultural phenomenon, is one important part in social cultural system of human beings. Religious culture affects different respects of human society, and causes barriers to the communication between different cultures. In order to solve these problems, different translators choose different translation strategies.This dissertation tries to discuss the translation of religious culture in two English versions of Hongloumeng from the perspective of cultural message transition. Taking the two translated works of Hongloumeng—A Dream of Red Mansions translated by the couple of Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang and The Story of the Stone translated by David Hawkes and John Minford as examples, this dissertation is an attempt to explore the translation of religious culture in Hongloumeng. Because culture plays a very important role in translation and religious culture is of great significance in Hongloumeng, in Chapter One, the author introduces the definition, categories and characteristics of culture; the relationship between culture and translation; former studies on cultural translation and studies on culture translation in the two English versions of Hongloumeng. In Chapter Two, the author tries to introduce the main religions in both China and the west and discuss the influences of these religions in politics, philosophy, ethics, literature, arts and social customs. The author also tries to analyze the reflection and significance of religious culture in Hongloumeng in Chapter Three. In Chapter Four, the author introduces the definition of domestication and foreignization and disputes over domestication and foreignization. Taking examples of the translation of religious culture from the two complete English versions, the author analyzes the translation strategies of Yang Xianyi and David Hawkes. 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 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 messages 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, especially religious culture, but cultural untranslatability is not absolute and it can be minimized by various translation techniques and methods. So the author discusses the translation strategies of religious cultural factors in the fifth chapter. In the last part, the author makes a conclusion of the whole dissertation and provides suggestions.The purpose of this dissertation is that more and more translators will pay attention to the religious culture in Chinese classical works so that more English versions with more cultural messages transferred will come into being, in which the English readers can appreciate much more Chinese culture more intelligibly and like Chinese culture better. Therefore, Chinese classical works, including Hongloumeng, will get their proper positions in the world literature.