On The Yangs' And Hawkes' Translating Strategies Of Hong Lou Meng: An Ideological Perspective

Comparing the two English versions of Hong Lou Meng, it is not difficult to find that the Yangs'version A Dream of Read Mansions and Hawkes'version The Story of the Stone differ from each other in handling the cultural elements in translating. Generally speaking, the Yangs'version adopts semantic translation and Hawkes'adopts communicative translation.Belgium scholar Lefevere believes translation is a typical form of rewriting under the manipulation of ideology and poetics, which dictates the basic strategy the translator uses. On the basis of his theory, the thesis tries to explore the influences of ideology on the two translators'different translating strategies. Examples from these two versions are compared and examined to see how the two translators tend to deal with the same cultural elements, and to illustrate how the two translating strategies are made under the influence of ideology.Based on the evidence found, the thesis concludes that a translator'individual ideology is formed against the particular society and culture, and derivate from the general ideological environment. The two translators, one coming from the source culture and the other from the target culture, have formed different individual ideologies. As a result, they have different motivations for translating the Chinese novel, different attitudes on the source culture (SC) and the source text (ST), and different focus in interpreting the original. Accordingly, they have applied different strategies in translating the same literary work, Hong Lou Meng.