A Comparative Study On Dietetic Culture Translation In Hong Lou Meng

The Classic novel Hong Lou Meng or A Dream of the Red Chamber is viewed as"the encyclopedia of Chinese cluture", in which the dietetic culture is especially described delicately and elegantly. The study of the translation of Hong Lou Meng constitutes an important area in translation studies due to the potential contributions to both translation theory and practice of the studies per sec. At present, considerable amount of studies only focus specifically on the two complete English versions of Hong Lou Meng produced respectively by Yang Xianyi (together with Gladys Yang) and David Hawkes (continued by John Minford). Few scholars touch on more versions from the macro-level of culture as a whole.The theoretical perspetives of the study includs foreignizing and domesticating strategies and Skopos theory, and an integrated methodology using both rational and empirical and both qualitative and quantatitive methods and procedures, the objectives of the present study are to make a comparative study of the translations of dietetic culture in the first 56 chapters of the three English versions of HLM (Yang's, Hawkes'and the third version being Bencraft Joly's Hung Lou Meng) to see how the ranslators dealt with the cultur-specific contents in HLM in terms of their strategies, and to what extent they succeeded or failed in representing the deitetic culture of the source text.Generally speaking, there are two basic translation strategies: domestication and foreignization. A review of these two translation strategies finds that numerous disputes can be found over these two strategies both in China and in the west. In these disputes people tend to consider two strategies as a binary opposition, arguing for one and against the other. However, little notice has been given to the following questions: Why does a translator choose this strategy instead of the other? What are the elements that influence the translator's choice? As to these problems, the author uses the Skopos theory which provides a new perspective for the debated issue of domestication and foreignization. The Skopos theory holds that the top-ranking rule is the Skopos rule, that is, which translation strategy to choose is determined by the purpose the initiator or translator intends to achieve and the purpose of a translation is again influenced by many factors. Within the Skopos theory the criterion to judge a translation is adequacy which refers to the qualities of a target text with regard to the translation brief, that is, whether the translator succeeds in achieving the intended purpose by choosing a specific strategy.A comparative analysis of the translations of the dietetic culture in HLM and its three English versions reveals that the choice of strategies of the dietetic culture rendtitions is an integral part of the translation of the novel and is mainly determined by their respective translation Skoposi; Joly and Yang tend to employ foreignizing strategy (80.90% and 79.78% respectively) to retain the original culture flavour whereas Hawkes mostly (53.93%) takes reader-oriented domesticating strategy, however, it seems inevitable that great amount of examples using foreignizing (46.07%) appear in his rendition.The findings of this study may help to enhance the translator's awareness or ability to flexibly select translation strategies according to different translation Skoposi or briefs, meanwhile offset the existing inadquency in relevant sduties. It is also hoped that these findings may shed light on translation teaching and practice in the future.