A Study Of The Color Words In Hong Lou Meng From The Perspective Of Sociosemiotics

Hong Lou Meng, one of the most influential novels in classic Chinese literature, is an encyclopedia of Chinese civilization and culture. It is not only abundant in content but in aesthetic values and cultural associations. Color words are abundantly used in the novel from the description of characters'dresses, appearances to the portrayal of circumstances in the original text. Color words are not only put in depicting the psychology of figures but also in suggesting their dispositions. Therefore, their uses reveal the social and cultural features of times of the author. A same color word may evoke most likely different implications and symbolic images in different cultures. So a primary responsibility for the translator is to transmit the cultural-loaded information expressed by color words. This thesis makes an attempt to study from the perspective of sociosemiotics the color words and color symbols in Hong Lou Meng presented by Hawkes.In the view of sociosemiotics, translating is a form of transference between signs and symbol systems, which appear in different cultural contexts. According to Charles Morris, linguistic signs have three types of meaning:designative meaning, inter-linguistic meaning and pragmatic meaning; Peter Newmark divides it into six types of functions: information function, expressive function, vocative function, aesthetic function, phatic function and metalinguistic function. Translation is cultural exchange, that is, the process of encoding and decoding cultural signs and symbols. The sociosemiotic approach can help translators reproduce the meanings and functions at all levels, thus attaining "correspondence in meaning and similarity in function".In the light of the sociosemiotic approach, the translation of color words in Hong Lou Meng has supplied a much broader scopes, which help the translators understand cultural differences and barriers between the east and the west, and discern how to communicate and exchange the cultural differences in translation within the maximum limit.