| Hong Lou Meng is a great work in the history of Chinese and world literature. It is acclaimed to be the peak of classic works in China, because it not only unrolls a panorama of the feudal society, but also describes the five thousand years'incorporated Chinese cultural heritages in a very vivid way. As a highly artistic and cultural book it has aroused wide and incessant interest at home and abroad. So far, there are altogether nine English versions, being special and brilliant scenery in the translation history. Among them, the most famous and influential versions are A Dream of Red Mansions translated by Yang Xianyi and his British wife Gladys Yang, The Story of the Stone translated by David Hawkes and his son-in-law John Minford. The two versions are very successful and are highly praised by the translators and translation theorists, most importantly, by the readers at home and abroad.Since 1970s there is a"cultural turn"on the study of translation, it offered a new perspective for the researchers, since then cultural perspective in translation draws more and more attention. As an encyclopedic novel of Chinese culture, Hong Lou Meng and its two versions have aroused wide interest. There are many comments and criticism on the two versions, based on the previous study, scholars agree that Yang Xianyi's translation strategy is mainly foreignization and his version tends to be semantic translation while Hawkes'is domestication and tends to be communicative translation. Most of the researches on the translation of cultural elements of Hong Lou Meng ever before only compare the two versions with each other or compare the two versions with the original, few of them explore the real reasons that influence the different versions, even they explored the reasons, they just explored from a single perspective, such as from the subjectivity of the translator or from the functionalist theories, few concrete on the comprehensive reasons that influence the translation of cultural elements.This thesis selects the translation of cultural elements in the two versions of Hong Lou Meng—A Dream of Red Mansions and The Story of the Stone, and makes a comparative study on the translation of it. The thesis not only compares the translation strategies, the translation methods, the translation effects between the two versions based on case study, but also or more importantly, aims at exploring the influential factors on the translation of cultural elements of this great novel. The thesis consists of five chapters:First of all, Chapter One is an introduction to the novel Hong Lou Meng and its English versions. In this chapter, the author mainly illustrates the reasons to choose the two completed versions. Chapter Two is literature review, introduces the study on the translation of Hong Lou Meng and its achievement. Chapter Three is the comparative study on the translation of cultural elements. In this part, the author gives the definition and categories of culture, and compares the translation on cultural elements based on case study. Chapter Four is the main body of this thesis, based on the case study in Chapter three, this chapter explores the factors that influence the translation of cultural elements from two perspectives: subjective and objective, and finally conclude five main influential factors. The last part is the conclusion, the author concludes the main findings of this thesis, and offers some proposals for further study.The author holds that translation should not be limited at linguistic level, exploring the influential factors on the translation of cultural elements by comparative study is an important subject under the cultural perspective in translation. The great novel Hong Lou Meng has won high reputation all over the world, so comparisons on the two versions are beneficial to the career of translation especially to the translation of Chinese classic literature and therefore promote the communication between China and other countries.
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