A Sociosemiotic Perspective Towards Duilian Translation In Hawkes's English Version Of Hong Lou Meng

Duilian, a special genre which is only owned by Chinese culture, is cherished as the crystallization of Chinese brilliant culture and long history. Duilian, colloquially called duizi or lianyu, consists of two lines which are literally called shanglian(上联,meaning the upper line) and xialian(下联,meaning the lower line) respectively. Two lians should have the same number of characters and the same sentence structures, and strictly speaking, the corresponding characters in them should be in the same part of speech and in the opposite tonal pattern——ping(平)and ze(仄).In addition, duilian has beautiful expressions and profound images. To sum up, duilian has usually known for its great aesthetic value with regular linguistic forms, harmonious rhymes and musical sounds, and rich and significant contents. Therefore, it has long been appreciated by the Chinese people, from the scholar to the common people, and from the young to the old. With the development of cultural exchanges between China and other countries, the translation of duilian, such a unique cultural-loaded literary genre, has always attracted the interest of many translators and scholars. But also these outstanding characteristics pose many difficulites in the translation of duilian. Hong Lou Meng is one of the greatest novels of ancient China. This masterpiece encompasses almost all the literary genres in the Chinese traditional literature, and of course, duilian is one of the specific subjects for research. In this novel there are over 100 pairs of duilian, not only connected closely with the development of the story but also well written with high aesthetic value.In this thesis sociosemiotic approach to translation is adopted in the study of duilian translation in The Story of the Stone translated by David Hawkes. Based on the theory of semiotics, the core contents of the approach are:first, the world is composed of signs conveying meaning and translation is an action of transferring the meaning of a sign in one kind of language to another; second, translation should be dealt with as a decoding and encoding process not only in the linguistic context but also in the whole circumstances of culture and society. Chen Hongwei proposes her sociosemiotic translation criterion:"correspondence in meaning and similarity in function". The research of this thesis is based on the criterion with the assessment of duilian translation in Hawkes's The Story of the Stone. On one hand, Charles W. Morris's meaning trichology is adopted in the analysis of "correspondence in meaning" of duilian translation in The Story of the Stone. Morris claims that linguistic semiotics is composed of three parts:semantics, syntax and pragmatics, and accordingly, a linguistic sign carries three meanings:(1) referential meaning, created by the relation of a sign to its referent; (2) linguistic meaning, produced by the relation between a sign and other signs; (3) pragmatic meaning, reflected by the relation of a sign to the interpretant. On the other hand, M.A.K. Halliday's Systematic-Functional Grammar is employed in the evaluation of "similarity in function" of duilian translation in The Story of the Stone. Halliday holds that language that must be put into the social and cultural context is a system in which the semantic sub-system is the most important part and also points out the semantic system is functional. He distinguishes three functions of language, namely, ideational metafunction, interpersonal metafunction and textual metafunction. So, the thesis intends to assess whether duilian translation in the Story of the Stone reaches the aim of "similarity in function" from these three aspects.