On The Translation Of Social Deixis In A Dream Of Red Mansions Into English-from The Perspective Of Dynamic Adaptation Of Cultural Context

Social deixis means those aspects of language structure that encode the social identities of participants and the social relationship between them. It includes the personal pronouns and terms of address. Terms of address are studied in this thesis. Each language develops its own unique social terms of address system during its development and evolvement in the long history. Affected by Confucianism and feudal ethics, our Chinese people develop a patriarchal clan system, which has high respect for the hierarchical order between elder and younger siblings and the different social status between man and woman. So the social terms of address in Chinese are various and accurate. However, English and American people are affected by the culture of Christianity, they advocate personal value and emphasize individualism. Individualism is the focus and thus leads to completely different social deixis. The kinship terms in English are less complex. Social deixis in English are not as typical as those in Chinese. As a result, it leads to some problems in transferring Chinese social deixis into English. In addition, social deixis changes with society. The cultural differences cause some lexical and cultural gap between Chinese and English social deixis. Therefore, it is not easy to faithfully transmit the original cultural information implicated in social deixis to the target culture.A Dream of Red Mansions, a flamboyant flower of Chinese classical literature, is compared to a real picture of the culture and the history in Ming and Qing Dynasties. In this novel, the author describes the rising and falling of four big families in details. Meanwhile, the author constructs a complicated interpersonal system vividly and truthfully among hundreds of people. The social deixis plays an very important role in maintaining the hierarchical order in the feudal official clan. This thesis is a case study of two English versions of A Dream of Red Mansions, one is translated by Yang Hsienyi and Gladys Yang , the other is translated by David Hawkes and John Minford. All the examples are extracted from a corpus of A Dream of Red Mansions and the two English versions. This thesis attempts to explore the translation of social deixis in A Dream of Red Mansions from the new perspective of dynamic adaptation to cultural context. The Theory of Adaptation posed by Jef Verschueren (1999) is employed as the theoretical foundation of the thesis. Dynamic adaptation of cultural context claimed by this theory may help to throw new light on translating social deixis. The research findings are shown as follows: the same social deixis may have different meaning in different cultural context. Adaptation to cultural context can decide whether the cultural information implicated in the social deixis is required transmitting or not and it also proves to be a good way to solve the lexical and cultural gap between Chinese and English social deixis. Different translation methods and strategies will be taken in the light of dynamic adaptation of cultural context.