A Corpus-based Comparison Of Terms Of Dress And Personal Adornment In Hong Lou Meng And Its English Versions

Dress includes upper clothes, nether clothes, headgear, footwear and waist wear; Personal adornment includes hair adornment, neck adornment, hand adornment, wrist adornment, ear adornment and body adornment. The research data of this paper consist of the terms of dress and personal adornment in Hong Lou Meng or A Dream of Red Mansion and their renditions in the first fifty-six chapters of Hawkes, the Yangs and Joly. Based on previous studies on terms of dress and personal adornment in HLM and their renditions, this paper first defines and classifies the terms of dress and personal adornment. Following a concordance query of the data in the Hong Lou Meng Chinese-English parallel corpus with the aid of ParaConc, a descriptive study is conducted comparing the English renditions of terms of dress and personal adornment in three English versions by adopting the cultural connotations or cultural values of terms of dress and personal adornment as the analytical tool and Peter Newmark's semantic translation and communicative translation theory as the theoretical basis, aiming at exploring the similarities and differences in the strategies adopt by the translators to represent the cultural values of terms of dress and personal adornment in Hong Lou Meng. The implications of this study may lie in summarizing the rules of translating terms of dress and personal adornment, shedding light on the translation of terms of dress and personal adornment in other Chinese classical works, and offering help in future translation teaching and translation practice.By analyzing the renditions of terms of dress and personal adornment in the three English versions, it is found that though all the three versions used a combination of semantic and communicative approach, the translators have different translation tendencies. Generally speaking, Hawkes used the communicative approach most frequently, while Joly and the Yangs tended to use semantic approach. It also finds out that in the process of translation, the ideology of the translators, authority, patrons, target audience and central text have qn effect on the translation. When analyzing the translations of terms of dress and personal adornment, terms that have high cultural connotations, it is not only necessary to pay attention to the semantic translation and communicative translation of them, but also to take the cultural connotations of these terms into consideration while assessing the quality of translation. Therefore, in translation teaching practice, the translation of terms that have high cultural connotations should be analyzed from the cultural point of view.Due to the length and time limitation, however, my present study only covers the comparison of the renditions of terms of dress and personal adornment in the first 56 chapters of the three English versions. Therefore, it is imperative and necessary for a further study to cover all the renditions of terms of dress and personal adornment in more translations of Hong Lou Meng, so the research result will be more representative and valuable.