| Hong Lou Meng is one of the best treasury accumulations of Chinese culture. The characters shaped by Cao Xueqin in Hong Lou Meng are all lifelike, and are closer to reality. However, as to the comments on the characters in the novel, Hong Lou Meng scholars always hold different views, which seem to leave us an academic subject that is difficult to be clarified.Hong Lou Meng has a great influence on the history of Chinese literature. One of the main reasons is that Cao Xueqin has opened up a new era of literary writing in China. Cao Xueqin can be regarded as a great master of language for he adopted lots of linguistic skills in writing Hong Lou Meng so that to make the characters more vivid. This is why countless Hong Lou Meng scholars at home and abroad in all times take more interest in studying Hong Lou Meng. As for graduate students majoring in foreign linguistics and applied linguistics, Hong Lou Meng can be considered as a very valuable work for research. Using pragmatic theories to analyze and explore the characters'utterances in the novel not only help us enhance the professional knowledge, but also help us understand the linguistic art more fully.Inspired by previous studies, the present thesis tries to make a contrastive study of Wang Xifeng's 16 typical utterances and the related descriptions in the first 80 chapters of two English translated versions: The story of the Stone by Mr. David Hawkes and his son-in-law Mr. John Manford, and A Dream of Red Mansions by Mr. Yang Hsien-yi and his wife Gladys Yang for the purpose of exploring how pragmatic skills can be highlighted in the translation by using the theories of context, pragmatics and speech act. As we all know, Wang Xifeng is a very important character in Hong Lou Meng. It is this typical person who can authoritatively deal with all the things and events in Jia Family and get along with all the people successfully; and who can deal with various relations successfully with her wise, smooth and slick skills or methods. All these figurative features of Wang Xifeng can be sensed from her vivid and flexible utterances and the related descriptions. Cao Xueqin, by all means, focused on describing Wang Xifeng so as to make this vivid image who seems to move out of the paper. So the translators always pay more attention on translating this artistic image and her utterances. Because of the limited space, the present thesis, focusing on discussing pragmatic skills, only analyzes Wang Xifeng's typical utterances and the related descriptions in translated versions from two aspects: flattering the Lady Dowager and be vicious to the servant and rival in love.Through analysis of the two English translated versions, we can see that Yang and Hawkes all have done a lot of hard work in translating. But the translations are different and both of the versions have their advantages and disadvantages. Yang's translation is more implicit and full of Chinese flavor, while Hawkes'translation stresses upon the Cooperative Principle in the discourse. Based on the analysis, several findings have been presented as follows: Firstly, in order to translate the characters in Hong Lou Meng well, the translator must understand the original version fully. Secondly, except owning a full understanding of the original version, the translator must skillfully conduct pragmatic skills in translation. Thirdly, the translator must better own the Chinese cultural background. With all above, the translator can be capable to reproduce the original version while translating. However, English and Chinese cultures are two different cultures after all; the cultural default in the translation will be inevitable, which will affect the translation negatively sometimes.
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