A Contrastive Analysis Of The Three English Versions Of The Reporting Verb "Xiao Dao" In Hong Lou Meng

Hong Loumeng (HLM) is one of the four most famous classical literary works inChina. There was no punctuation in ancient Chinese, therefore, all kinds of characters'speeches are led by "shuo","wen","dao", etc. According to my statistics, in chapter1to56, there are1562characters' speeches are led by "xiaodao". This thesis takes all the "xiaodao" appeared in chapter1to56as linguistic datas in Yang Xianyi couple's translation ADream of Red Mansions, The Story of the Stone translated by British scholar David.Hawkes and Minford, and The Red Chamber by Bramwell Seaton Bonsall and takes theadaptability theory of Verschueren as fundamental theory to discuss the translation methodof "xiao dao" in three English versions.Through retrieval and observation, the translation approaches of three translators canbe divided to four types:"only translate 'xiao'","only translate 'dao'","both 'xiao' and'dao' are translated","neither 'xiao' nor 'dao' are translated".The proportions of translation approaches of three translators have great disparity,besides, three translators translation methods are widely divergent. Through thecomparison of both quantity and tipical examples, it tries to analyze whether "xiao dao"which translated by three translators can faithfully convey and be loyal to the background,personality, identity, breeding, status and individual character of specific figures in thesource language text.Considering that words can be sure of their real meaning only when they are put inspecific context, this thesis studies the three translators' adaptation degrees during thelanguage-choice process from the aspects of physical world, social world and mentalworld in Verschueren's communicative context.The writer finds the fact that due to the translator's subjectivity differences,differences of understanding of the story plot and the characters, differences of translationpurposes, thus lead to translations of "xiao dao" differ in thousands of ways. Yang Xianyicouple comprehensively grasp the social status, temperament of the characters, characters'relations, utterance occasions, and actively adapt to social world, physical world and mental world when the speeches are producing. Through the translation of "xiao dao",Yangs couple reproduce the source language culture accurately, brightly, flexibly andvividly.Although HLM has been extensively studied by Chinese and foreign scholars,reporting verb gets less attention. Moreover, scholars often ignore English version ofBonsall. This paper includes all "xiao dao" in chapter1to56of HLM, compares threeEnglish versions of Yangs, Hawkes and Bonsall from the perspective of contextualadaptability theory. I look forward to provide useful perspective for reporting verbtranslation, and give some hints to reporting verb translation in the future.