A Comparative Study Of Parodies In Hawkes’and Yang’s Translations Of Hong Lou Meng:a Figure/Ground Approach

Within some context, to realize the rhetorical effects of humor, sarcasm, or novelty, a speaker/writer would temporarily coin new words with the help of a given one. This is usually done by replacing a given morpheme of the word by a new one, which is termed "parody". Parody is classifiable into different types by different criteria. In view of its concerned semantic spectrum, parody is divided into lexical parody, syntactic parody and text parody. This thesis has its focus on lexical parody, namely, parody on the lexical level.Hong Lou Meng (By Hong Lou Meng, the author means the original work created by Chinese writer Cao Xueqin.) has long been celebrated for its well trimmed diction, which remains a heat of discussion within the Redology research domain. Of all the rhetorical devices adopted in the part of Hong Lou Meng, parody is undoubtedly the most conspicuous one. And a great number of researchers have written on this from various points of research. Similarly, among researchers of Hong Lou Meng translation, parody translation is also a great matter of concern. In this thesis, figure-ground theory, which serves as fundamentals in cognitive linguistics, is adopted to construct a new model for understanding parody, and for the evaluation of translation equivalence. And this new model serves as a yardstick for comparing and assessing the two translations of Hong Lou Meng. Specifically, first of all, parodies in the first80chapters of Hong Lou Meng are picked out and listed; second, different translations of each parody from The Story of the Stone and A Dream of Red mansions are also listed one by one; third, taken figure-ground theory as a criterion, two translations for each Chinese parody are examined as for whether they have achieved the four levels of figure-ground relations in the source language text (SLT); finally, conclusion is drawn as to which one of the two translations is more strategic and faithful to the SLT.The pivotal of figure-ground theory is "prominence" which holds that in observing an object or a scene, people tend to separate it into two parts—the foregrounded part and the backgrounded one. The former is a "figure" and cognitive focus, while the latter serves as a "ground".In the beginning of1920s, Danish psychologist Robin brought figure-ground theory into Psychology, and later it was employed by Gestalt psychologists to study space organization. Then in late1970s, cognitive linguist Talmy initiated its application to linguistic study. Later, cognitive grammarian Langacker substituted figure-ground by another pair of term—trajector/landmark—and continued to employ the theory to describe and explain a variety of linguistic phenomena.The relation between figure and ground resembles that between the two parties within each parody in that they share common features in the following three dimensions: characteristics, mechanism of operation, and way of recognition.First of all, they share more or less the same characteristics, Particularly,"figure" usually has some unknown properties that want defining by "ground" which carries some known properties. The same holds true for parody.Moreover, they operate and take effect in almost the same way. Figure-ground organization works via foregrounding and prominence, so does the lexical pair of each parody.Last but not least, the generation and recognition of both a figure-ground structure and a parody is by nature cognitive and dependent on comparison.Within each parody, there are altogether four levels of figure-ground relation. In an ideal translation of a parody, the four levels are all achieved with equal attention and they constitute a complete equivalence with the parody in source language (SL). More often than not, however, due to cultural discrepancy as well as that Hong Lou Meng is linguistically more metaphorical than one can imagine, it is somehow impossible of translating all levels of figure-ground relation. As a result, there appear only three types of equivalence in both Hawkes’and Yang’s translations, namely, complete equivalence, partial equivalence, and nonequivalence. And in this thesis, they are examined one by one.