A Survey Of Hawkes's Translation Of Hong Lou Meng From The Perspective Of The Three-Dimensional Meaning Structures

This thesis conducts a comparative study of Hawkes's and Yang's translations of Hong LouMeng from the perspective of the verbal dimension, the communicative dimension and theaesthetic dimension as is defined in Zhu Chunshen's three-dimensional meaning structurestheory, in an attempt to find out David Hawkes's translation strategies and his translation style.It is an established fact that the study of translation entails the guidance of linguistic theory,and the linguistic theoretical system has been evolving into an effective device to be applied tothe interpretation of translating activities. Based on Halliday's"mega-functions"theory and J. L.Austin's"speech act"theory, Zhu Chunshen proposes the three-dimensional meaning structurestheory that holds true for the comparative study of this very paper.In the first place, linguistic symbols are culturally connected, and their basic experiencemeanings are to be examined in a wider field of discourse, i.e. the cultural background as islargely involved in the verbal dimension. Secondly, investigation is conducted in thecommunicative dimension to linguistic forms of target language—its evaluative meanings,stylistic meanings and the transition of information structure between English and Chinese.Thirdly, representation of specific linguistic forms is involved in the aesthetic dimension.It is concluded in this thesis that Hawkes employs primarily substitution and amplification toheighten the"markedness"of the source text's cultural information, affective and stylisticinformation and aesthetic information. And in terms of style, Hawkes's version of Hong LouMeng could be labeled the full translation.