On The Reflections Of Religious Images In Hongloumeng’s Different English Versions

Cao Xueqin’s Hongloumeng is one of the most excellent Chinese traditionalliteratures. It gets to the summit not only in the ideological content, but also in theartistic achievement. There are so many social aspects involved in this novel, just likeWang Guowei said: Hongloumeng has the features of philosophy, universe andliterature. Such an extensive and profound masterpiece is Chinese culture’s treasure aswell as a miracle in the world. Both Chinese readers and western readers have greatinterests in it. From1830till now, there came up more than twenty foreign languagestranslations. But among these versions, the most well known two versions are TheStory of the Stone translated by English man David Hawkes and John Minford, and ADream of Red Mansion translated by Chinese translator Yang Xianyi and his wifeGladys Yang. At the same time, along with these two versions’ publication, more andmore academicians devoted themselves in the comparison of Hongloumeng’sdifferent English versions. Recent years, there are a lot of passages make researches,analysis and do comparisons on these two versions. Most of the researches are fromthe viewpoints of Chinese poems, characters’ languages, idioms to discuss thetranslation, but seldom make deeper researches on the religious factor’s translation.As a matter of fact, translation is not just a simple switch between linguisticsymbols but a dynamic communication between different cultures. From the aspect oftranslation,“culture” means the whole society’s living style or a nationality’straditional behavior type. It includes one nation’s bureaucracy system, religionbelieving, custom, literature and arts, language, ideology and moral, etc.. It can besaid that different nationalities’ cultural backgrounds can shape different living stylesand different characters. There are Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism in Chinesetraditional culture everywhere, but western cultures are mainly influenced by Greekmythology and Bible. As the translator, Yang Xianyi and Hawkes’ different culture identities, backgrounds and translation purposes made these two English versionshave totally different guiding ideas and translating strategies.This paper tends to take the viewpoint of culture transmission to discuss thereligious cultures’ different translation in The Story of the Stone and A Dream of RedMansion, and the specific religious images’ spreading in the whole world. As a matterof fact, Hongloumeng’s translating history is not short, but there still have someproblems worth discussing about. The writer mainly divides this paper into fiveChapters. In Chapter One, the writer makes a brief introduction to the purpose andsignificance of this study as well as shows the organization of this paper. In ChapterTwo, the writer does a literature review. The writer makes a brief introduction toHongloumeng’s translation history and points out the present research and existingproblems in Hongloumeng’s translation and dissemination firstly. Then the writerintroduces the main religions in China. In Chapter Three, the writer mainly does ananalysis to Hongloumeng’s religious image translation. The religious images inHongloumeng are stressed by the writer, Buddhist and Taoist images in the daily life,characters’ names, idioms are talked about in details. The writer also makes acomparison of religious images translation strategies between these two versions. Thewriter points out that Yang Xianyi and Hawkes adopted similar as well as differenttranslating strategies. Both of them destroyed Hongloumeng’s original religiousimages to some extent by deleting or improper explanation. But as a native Chinesetranslator, Yang Xianyi tried his best to adopt the strategy of foreignization to get thegoal of spreading classical Chinese culture. Very different from Yang Xianyi, Hawkesmainly used domestication, in order to let the western readers understand the contentof Hongloumeng easier. In Chapter Four, the author makes a deeper research on thereasons why translators use different translation strategies. Generally speaking, thereare five aspects, the first one is translators’ different backgrounds; the second one isdifferent translation purposes; the third one is different target readers, the fourth one isdifferent ideology; the last one is source text’s different status in China and in thewestern countries. In Chapter Five, the author makes a summary of the whole paper,and puts forward some suggestions for the religious translation in literary works. The purpose of this paper is hoping the translators pay more attention to theculture elements, especially the religious culture elements during their processes ofChinese classical works’ translation. Only by a good translation of the special Chineseculture, can introduce the Chinese traditional culture to the whole world perfectly andhelp the western reader appreciate Chinese culture more intelligibly.