A Study Of Yang Xianyi's Translation Of Hong Lou Meng From The Perspective Of Peter Nemark's Text Type Classification And Translation Methods

Hong Lou Meng,as one of the four Chinese literary masterpieces in ancient China,has attracted a lot of attention since its first publication.Taking Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu's love story as the plotline,Hong Lou Meng tells the reader how the aristocratic Jia Family goes from heyday to decline.According to incomplete statistics, up to now,Hong Lou Meng has been translated into more than 23 foreign languages, and its English versions alone(full versions and abridged ones) amount to nine,the most popular among which are two:A Dream of Red Mansions by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang,and The Story of the Stone by David Hawkes and John Manifold.A large number of scholars have done researches on the English translation,paying attention to almost all aspects of Hong Lou Meng,including food,poems,clothing, dialogues,etc.All those studies have paved the way for the further understanding of Hong Lou Meng,an encyclopedia of ancient China.Yang Xianyi and his wife Gladys Yang are world-renowned translators.They have translated a lot of classical Chinese literary works and their translation of Hong Lou Meng is considered as one of the best versions there have ever been today.The author of the dissertation,by taking some sentences and paragraphs from the Yangs' version and studying the translation methods employed by the couple,tries to illustrate how flexible and useful are Peter Newmark's text type classification and semantic & communicative translation methods.All the examples are taken according to the text types they belong to,including dialogues and descriptions of the surroundings and people in them.The author finds that when dealing with expressive texts,the translator chooses semantic translation and tries to keep as many features of the source language and cultural elements as possible to reproduce the original flavor in the target language.When it comes to informative and vocative texts,the translator prefers communicative translation to semantic translation,trying every possible means to produce a translation easier to comprehend.By applying Peter Newmark's text classification and translation methods,the image and flavor of the original work can be preserved in the target language so that good translations may be assured or better ones may be brought about than done otherwise.Through the case study,the author concludes that Peter Newmark's translation methods and text classification are of great flexibility and usefulness in guiding the translation process.If the translator can first judge which text type the material belongs to and then choose a translation method,semantic translation or communicative translation or both when necessary, the information,cultural elements and flavor will be maximized in the target language.