A Comparative Study Of The Four English Translations Of The Verdict Poems In Hong Lou Meng: With Reference To The Appraisal Theory

Since the birth of Hong Lou Meng, this novel has attracted attention from abroad andhome, for its distinctive charm in language usage. There are as many as180poems in thisnovel. Among those poems, Jinling Prophecy plays an important role in indicating thecharacters' fate and their qualities. In view of that, different translators have their ownstyles in dealing with Jinling Prophecy.This paper tends to evaluate the translator's style under the framework of Appraisaltheory and takes the source text, Hawkes', Joly's, the Yangs' and Bonsall's version as theresearch subject. Detailed analysis is carried out between the source text and the fourtranslated versions in terms of attitude, engagement and graduation resources and tries todiscover the four translator's style, the similarities and differences among the translations'versions, translation strategies that each translator applies to deal with appraisal resourcesand the reasons that lead to the different styles of translators.Through qualitative and quantitative analysis, this paper finds out that under theattitude resource, the author prefers the attitude of Judgement and Affect, while translatorsprefer the attitude of Judgement and Appreciation, instead of Affect. Under theengagement resource, the source text contains both monogloss and heterogloss. In theversions of Hawkes and Joly, they intend to apply the second person to describe thecharacters in the verdict poem, while Yangs and Bonsall prefer the third person.Comparatively speaking, Hawkes' and Joly's rendering is much more acceptable when itcomes to the expression of monogloss. While in the heterogloss resources, only Bonsalldemonstrates the whole elements in the heterogloss. As for the graduation, this paperdiscovers that the graduation words and phrases in the source text are used to strengthenthe attitude or voice. And in the translated versions, it is still Bonsall that expresses allgraduation words and phrases, while the other three only express the part of them. Inaddition, in the aspects of coping with appreciation words and phrases, Hawkes prefers toemploy free translation and explanatory notes, while the other three translators intend toapply literal translation, which is, perhaps, because the four transltors' are in the different times and have various translation purposes.According to the analysis above, this paper further demonstrates that Appraisal theorycan be applied to the translation studies, especially to analyzing the translated versions ofverdict poem. However, the Appraisal theory is not a perfect one. It still needs furtherdiscussion and exploration.