Semiotic Approach To Proper Name Translation In Two English Versions Of Hong Lou Meng

Hong Lou Meng is the acme of Chinese literature. For more than two centuries thismasterpiece has remained attractive not only to enchanted readers but also to numerousscholars. Translations of Hong Lou Meng are great contributions to the exchange of worldliterature and these translations deserve a special place in the field of translation studies inChina.Proper names are a special group of linguistic units which have attracted not onlylinguists but also philosophers. This thesis analyzes the translations of personal names,place names, religious names, opera names, literary works’ names, festival names and solarterms in two translations of Hong Lou Meng, namely A Dream of Red Mansions by YangXianyi and Gladys Yang, and The Story of the Stone by David Hawkes and John Minford.On the basis of Morrisian semiotics, this thesis postulates there are five kinds of sign usesand three kinds of meaning. Sign uses include identifying use, informative use, valuativeuse, incitive use and systemic use; three kinds of meaning include semantic meaning,pragmatic meaning and syntactic meaning. As previous researches have pointed out,although the ideal translation would be translating all the meanings contained in theoriginal text, it is usually impossible for us to achieve this goal in practice; we have todistinguish the most important meaning of a linguistic sign and consider this as the priorityin our translation. The semiotic approach to proper name translation this thesis proposesconsists of four steps: firstly, the translator must decide on the use of the original propername; secondly, the translator should determine the most important meaning of the originalproper name according to its use; thirdly, the translator should translate with the mostimportant meaning as the priority; fourthly, the translator should make compensations ifother meanings contained in the original proper name are unavoidably lost in the third step.After analysis conducted according to this approach, it is found that most propernames are used informatively in Hong Lou Meng and both semantic meanings andpragmatic meanings are important in the original text. The majority of proper names inHong Lou Meng have meanings but a relatively small number of them, being merely used identifyingly, do lack this feature.We also notice that the Yangs’ version, besides those proper names merely ofidentifying use, translates all personal names, despite the uses, via transliteration whileHawkes’ version translates personal names conforming to ordinary naming norm viatransliteration but translates those deviating from the norm by other methods. The reasonfor the prevalence of transliteration could be found in the discrepancy of Chinese andEnglish ordinary naming norms, the brevity of personal names and the advantage oftransliteration. Hawkes makes a fruitful attempt in the translation of personal names thatdeviate from ordinary naming norm.Besides personal names, major differences between the Yangs’ and Hawkes’ versionsare found when the most important meaning of the original name is pragmatic meaning.The translations that only transfer the semantic meanings of these linguistic signs areconsidered inadequate compared with those which bring out the more important pragmaticmeanings. Generally speaking, Hawkes’ translation of these proper names more accuratelytransfers their most important meanings, which is in line with the semiotic approachadvocated by this thesis. Proper names that have semantic meanings as their mostimportant meanings are mostly translated accordingly in both versions and comparativelyminor differences are found in this respect.