A Comparative Study Of Translations Of Chapter Titles In Hong Lou Meng From The Perspective Of Skopostheorie

As one of the Four Great Classic Novels in China, Hong Loumeng has been widely regarded as"the Encyclopedia of Chinese feudal society". With a thread of Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu's love tragedy running through the whole story, the great book depicts the rising and downfall of four big families in the feudal society. Being the acme of zhanghui novels in ancient China, it is worthwhile discussing because the chapter titles in Hong Loumeng represent abundant linguistic and cultural connotation. As the most distinctive characteristics of zhanghui novels, chapter titles have their unique charm and particular features and functions. Up to the present, there are a great number of researchers who have studied Hong Loumeng from various perspectives. However, according to the materials and resources available at present, the research on the chapter titles is not quite satisfactory. As one action of human beings, translation has its particular purpose, which leads to the proposition of functionalist theory in which the Skopos rule determines the translation strategies employed in a specific translation in order to produce a functionally adequate target text and fully carry out the purpose of a translation. Therefore, excerpting chapter titles from the two English versions (Yang Xianyi and his wife Gladys Yang's A Dream of Red Mansions and David Hawkes and John Minfrod's The Story of the Stone) of Hong Loumeng as a research object, based on the Skopos theory in"German School"of functionalist translation theory, the thesis conducts the comparison and analysis of the differences between the two versions. According to the Skopostheorie, the Skopos rule dominates the most important position, that is, the employment of translation strategy is determined by the purpose that the translators or the agents intend to achieve. Therefore, the various translation purposes determine the different translation strategies in the Yangs'and Hawkes'versions. However, the translation Skopos is not random but confined by the translation brief composed by the initiator and target text addresses and many other factors. In order to keep the cultural flavor and transmit the Chinese traditional culture, the Yangs mainly adopt foreignization while Hawkes employs domestication so as to make his version more fluent and acceptable. Both the two versions achieve their goals well and are regarded as the most successful translated versions.The thesis is composed of five sections. To begin with, Chapter 1 serves as a general introduction in which the author provides some background information of Hong Loumeng and reviews the related researches and presents her writing motivation. Chapter 2 mainly talks about the origin and development of chapter titles and briefly introduces the common characteristics and functions of chapter titles. Then the author sets some examples to explicitly illustrate the particular characteristics and functions of the chapter titles in Hong Loumeng. The third chapter firstly presents the theoretical frame-Vermeer's Skopostheorie, and makes a brief introduction to the Skopos rule and rules of coherence and fidelity. Guided by the Skopostheorie, the present author explains how the two main factors-the agents and target text addressees determine the translation purpose. The fourth chapter is the main body of the whole thesis, in which the author compares the differences from the perspective of names, euphemisms, allusions and dictions between the two versions on the basis of Skopostheorie. It can be concluded that the Yangs adopt foreinization as the main method complemented by domestication while Hawkes mainly employs domestication with foreignization as a supplement. If necessary, they mix both of them when dealing with the concrete problems. The last chapter goes to summarize the major findings and limitations of this thesis.