On Translation Of Cultural Images In Dream Of Red Mansions From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence Theory

Hong Lou Meng, an exotic flower in Chinese literature, displays a glorious and colorful scroll painting before a vast of readers and is a great masterpiece renowned at home and abroad for its profound knowledge and super art characteristics. As is well known, translation is a complicated and multi-dimensional human activity relevant to many disciplines such as philosophy, linguistics, psychology, social customs, etc. However, the cultural turn in translation studies in1980s makes people lay more emphasis on the culture-based approaches to translation. Cultural image is the symbolic sign, which boasts both the specific external shapes and implied concrete symbolic meanings. Cultural image reflects a people’s culture. Exploration on the cultural image translation in Hong Lou Meng characteristic of its cultural image expressions is beneficial to understand the cultural meanings and promote the communication.Under the above-mentioned background, this thesis, based on the Functional Equivalence Theory, reviews the main ideas of the Functional Equivalence Theory and cultural images and explores the image differences in thinking patterns and expressions traced back to the sources of religions, beliefs and customs, etc. It elaborates on some images in Hong Lou Meng and analyzes the skills used in translation. By analysis of some different translations of images translated by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, and by David Hawkes, it expounds the skills and strategies of translation on cultural images and proves that compensation methods for cultural default in image translation from the Perspective of Functional Equivalence Theory are of practicability and feasibility, worthy of further studies and widen explorations.