Translation Of Personal Names In David Hawkes’ The Story Of The Stone:from The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Hong Lou Meng, a well-known classical novel in Chinese literature, is a treasure of Chinese culture. The personal names, literary names as well as the courtesy names of the characters in the novel embody and symbolize Chinese culture connotation.In Understanding Pragmatics, Verschueren proposes a pragmatic perspective on language use and assumes language use to be a continuous making of linguistic choices with different degrees of salience for the purpose of adaptation. During this process, we consider translation as a dynamic adaptation with regard to linguistic reality and extra-linguistic contexts with various degrees of salience. This thesis attempts to apply such a pragmatic theory into the study of names translation, exploring the possibility to establish a unified and coherent theory framework as to dealing with some translation problems such as transliteration or semantic translation.Under the framework outlined by Verschueren, the author gives a detailed analysis of the naming systems of English and Chinese. The personal names translation will be investigated from the aspects of phonetic adaptation, cultural adaptation, writer’s intention, reader’s aesthetic conceptions, reader’s acceptability, etc. To explore how the adaptation is achieved in the translation and why Hawkes adjusts his translation strategies in different language environments. Moreover, the author tries to figure out the merits and demerits of Hawkes’names translation from the perspective of AT, thus hoping to cast some light on the name translation.This study primarily based on the context adaptation inclination in the adaptation theory, which adopted in translating characters names in the English version of Hong Lou Meng by David Hawkes and John Minford. So many authentic examples from it are analyzed in details. Then the author analyzed the translation methods and strategies which translator adopted and the adaptation inclination he used in different context.Based on the analysis of the Hawkes’names translation under the adaptation theory, the study focuses on expressing the connotative meaning of the names and assessing the pros and cons of the translation. On the one hand, the author holds that the adaptation theory by Verschueren is bound to provide a very useful perspective for translation studies; on the other hand, the author hopes that through the research on names translation by David Hawkes in Hong Lou Meng, this thesis can provide a reference for other translators when dealing with names translation.