Translation Of Address Forms In Literary Works

Literary works represent culture. Translation of literary works serves as a bridge linking target readers and the source-language culture. Address forms, as cultural carriers, mirror interpersonal relationships and social culture. This thesis attempts to make a comparative study of address forms in Chinese and English with examples selected from the first eighty chapters of Hong Lou Meng and its two most influential English versions:one is A Dream of Red Mansions by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang and the other The Story of the Stone by David Hawkes. Through the comparative study, this thesis also tries to discover the effects of different translation methods and strategies on translation, explore differences in the Chinese and the Western address cultures, and discover effective means to compensate for cultural gaps in translation.Hong Lou Meng, being vivid and subtle representation of traditional address forms in feudal Chinese society, involves hundreds of characters, intricate relationships among whom lead to a variety of address forms. The complexity of address forms in Hong Lou Meng and differences between the two cultures set up a considerable barrier to translation. With two translation methods—literal translation and free translation and two translation strategies—domestication and foreignization as the theoretical backgrounds, the thesis discusses address forms in three categories:kinship terms, fictive kinship terms and names. Several factors are discussed accounting for differences in address cultures from the perspective of cultural backgrounds, dominant ideology and family structure.Despite the fact that people speaking different languages and with different cultural backgrounds share some overlapping constituents in address forms, which promises translatability, considerable differences also exist. Translation presents some strangeness and may result in some cultural gaps, partly owing to untranslatability in radicals (偏旁) of Chinese characters, in puns and allusions, and in "Zi" (字), "Hao" (号), and name taboo. Facing cultural default, translators undertake the duty to try every means to find ways of compensation. Approaches are offered to deal with the address forms in Hong Lou Meng and compensate for cultural default caused by huge differences between the two address systems:annotations for kinship terms, annotations for fictive kinship terms, and transliteration with explanation for names.The conclusion is drawn that the Yangs' version mainly takes literal translation and foreignization in the translation of address forms, appearing to be more faithful to the source text; Hawkes'version mainly takes free translation and domestication, which produces a target text more intelligible to the target reader. Besides, for the purpose of better spreading the source-language culture, the translator has to take pains and take active measures to compensate for cultural default despite degrees of untranslatability.