Xifeng And Daiyu’s Complaining Strategies In The English Versions Of Hong Lou Meng-a Pragmatic Approach

This thesis is dedicated to the comparison between Yang’s version and Hawkes’version of the translation of Hong Lou Meng through a quantitative analysis of thecomplaints made by the two major female characters of this novel—Wang Xifeng andLin Daiyu, supplemented by certain proportion of qualitative analysis since this studyis dealing with a literature work. Based on data collected with Concordancer, acomputer program that automatically constructs a concordance, the word or phrasefrequency in the speech act of complaining of the two heroines can be listed andinvestigated. This thesis directly analyzes the speech act of complaining itselfpragmatically through three perspectives—semantic components, syntactic and lexicaldevices and discourse devices. These three perspectives show explicitly the strategiesand the word and sentence choices of the heroines’ complaints.At the same time, since the speech act of complaints is majorly affected byvariables such as social status, social power and social distance, this thesis is revealedthrough three vertical dimensions—heroines’ complaints to those people with highersocial status, those with equal social status and those with lower social status. Eachdimension is carefully demonstrated and discussed with relevant data from Yang’s andHawkes’ translations respectively, added with a detailed analysis towards relevantresults. The differences of the complaints of Wang and Lin in two translations is alsopresented and explained.Probing into the speech act of complaining, this thesis can shed some light on thedifferences between the complaints made by Wang and Lin and thus provides answersto the following questions: Whether the differences between Wang’s and Lin’scomplaints have been successfully shown in Yang’s and Hawkes’ translations? Howare they presented and to what extent have they been revealed? From a careful datacollection and a specific analysis in depth, this thesis concludes that the complaints ofWang indeed vary from that of Lin since they enjoyed different power and status inJia family—Wang was the “general manager” while Lin was just a granddaughter ofLady Dowager who lived in Rong Mansion as a relative. Lin’s status could never be compared with that of Wang. In addition, the personalities of the two characters werewidely divergent from each other. Their ways of complaining indeed variedsignificantly. And when confronted with people with various social statuses, both thetwo characters adopted differentiated complaining strategies characterized by thedifferences in semantic components, syntactical and lexical devices and discoursedevices of their speech acts of complaining. In conclusion, the author finds out thatthese differences have been successfully expressed and reflected in both Yang’s andHawkes’ translations.This thesis aims to help with a further understanding of this well-known classicnovel—Hong Lou Meng, especially of the characteristics and speaking manners of thetwo main female characters. Analyzing specific translating examples in a quantitativeway is a quite new research methodology. The adoption of this method can help withour perception of the differences of Yang’s and Hawkes’ translations. And thus thestudy becomes more objective and comprehensive.