On The Transation Of Color Words In Hong Lou Meng: A Functionalist Perspective

Research home and abroad has been done on color words, the presence of which can be found in HLM, the most classic ancient Chinese novel. In this novel, many color words have been applied in the description of clothing, the arrangement of objects and scenery. Most of the previous researches on color words are a general analysis of the overall style of the novel; few focus on the color word translation.German functionalist theory, as a big trend in the realm of translation studies, is an instruction for the translation of many text types. Reiss? text typology, Vermeer?s skopos theory, Mantarri?s translatorial action theory and Cristiane Nord are the main four pillars of this theory. The translation action is defined by functionalist translation theory as a cultural transfer instead of a linguistic transfer.This definition has broken a new ground for the translation of literary works. The object into which this paper is investigating is the color word in HLM and its two versions respectively by Yang Hsien-Yi &Gladys Yang and David Hawks &John Minford. This paper makes a comparison between skopos theory and many theories about culture translation and through the comparison of the translation strategies of the two versions by Yang Hsien-Yi & Gladys Yang and David Hawkes, the author have the found that in order that the TT reader could better understand the content, the translator is inclined to adopt cultural translation in which many culture-loaded color words have lost their original meaning; during the process of translation, text typology of the ST(Source Text) and the function of the TT(Target Text) are the top concerns of Yang Hsien-Yi and David Hawkes respectively.