Translation Strategies Of Chinese Couplets In Hong Lou Meng

In the numerous ancient Chinese literary works, Hong Lou Meng is considered a jewel. The greatest classical Chinese novel written in the mid-eighteenth century during the reign of Emperor Chien-lung of the Qing Dynasty has been widely popular throughout the last two hundred years and more. The stroke of genius describes a vivid historical picture within a whole big family"Jia"in the last times of feudalism in China. It is always considered as an"encyclopedia"of Chinese traditional culture and art, covering a wide range of social and family composing, such as architecture, drama, preservation of people's health, cooking and diet, medicine and health, social convention, poetry, art, religion and so on. Up to now, Hong Lou Meng has more than 60 translated versions in 23 different languages, among which 12 are complete, which are the best resources for translation study of Chinese language and culture. Among all the translated versions, two versions are popular: one is A Dream of Red Mansions translated by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, and the other one is The Story of the Stone translated by David Hawkes and John Minford. And mainly in their two great translation works, they adopted respectively different translation strategies of domestication and foreignization.For a long time there has been the long-lasting disputing of exploitation of domestication and foreignization in translation of literary works. And this paper is a comparative study of translating strategies of domestication and foreignization from the perspective of translating Chinese couplets in Hong Lou Meng in the two versions of Yang Xianyi and Hawkes, mainly on three basic levels, namely semantic beauty, sound echoing and syntactic balance. With scientific analysis and comparison in two translated versions and sufficient quotations from the two translation works, we want to stress that the aim of this thesis is not to clearly define the superiority or inferiority of neither domestication nor forergnization in practical use of translation, but with a comparative study into picked examples to confess through a proper mixture of both the untranslatability of Chinese couplet is only the superficial phenomenon while translatability is the true essence of things, and the aesthetic effect of both domestication and foreignization strategies in translation can be achieved. The public doubt about interactive relationship between foreignization domestication lies out to be meaningless as long as through the facts discussed below in the essay we notice their mutual coexistence in the two translated versions of Chinese couplets, with taking into consideration that the two translations strategies even overlap each other in a certain degree. The dynamic achievement made by both the translators and target readers through respectively rewriting the language and"rereading"the language should be taken into translators'consideration before they go to translate. Thus, in a dynamic process of the translator's"reproducing", the translation really means reproducing the meaning of source language with the most approximate and most natural equivalents of target language both semantically and stylistically. Translation means communication, the main purpose of which is to exchange cultures. The impossibility of exact recreation does not mean the impossibility of approximation and it is precisely on approximation that good translation of poetic work must be built. And in short, a well-defined translation works better.