On Reproduction Of The Narration Type In Hongloumeng

Hongloumeng, the peak of Chinese classical novel, is full of fantastic plotarrangements and excellent writing style. All elements, such as characters’ discoursesand the story development, have been placed in the whole text which shows aneye-catching feature. David Hawkes’ version of Hongloumeng has been recognized asa great success since its first publication. Up till now, many researches have beenmade on David Hawkes’ version, but most of them are simply focused on thetranslation of the novel’s book name, chapter headings, characters’ names, couplets,and so on. As for its narrative perspective, however, few in the translation circle,either at home or abroad, have ever done a systematic research.Literary works, fictions in particular, are characterized with narrative features.Therefore, translators should, first of all, have a clear knowledge of the narrative typeand narrative style when translating a specific work. Only in this way can he or sheaccurately and properly transfer the style of the work. Being an important part ofwestern literary theory, narratology plays a significant role in contemporary westernliterary criticism. It mainly concentrates on literary criticism, and aims to study thewriting technique of the work, along with the creative structure and narrative type.Narratology falls into two classes: classical narratology and post-classical narratology.The former mainly focuses on the text itself, studying the narrator’s ways ofexpression on the level of “discourse” while the latter, based on classical narratology,pays more close attention to interdisciplinary study such as the interactions among theauthor, text, reader and social context. Since this thesis just discusses the transferencedevices on discourse level instead of including factors beyond the text, classicalnarratology will naturally be adopted as the thesis perspective.This paper, taking narratology theory as a tool and Hawkes’ version ofHongloumeng as the object, analyzes and compares the source text and the target textin terms of narrative point of view, narrative speech presentation, and narrative time (prolepsis). Through analysis, the following conclusions are reached:(1) In terms ofnarrative point of view, Hawkes’ translation skillfully employs various techniques andsuccessfully transfers the original features.(2) In terms of narrative speechpresentation, in order to reproduce the narrative effects, Hawkes’ translation makescertain appropriate changes in the different modes of speech.(3) In terms of narrativetime (prolepsis), due to the differences between Chinese and English languages, aswell as different cultural backgrounds, the translation is somehow incompetent in thereproduction of prolepsis types. As a whole, the Hawkes’ translation is a successfulreconstruction of the original novel from the perspective of narration type.Through the above analysis, this thesis comes to these conclusions: thetransference of the original text’s narration type plays a highly important role inconveying the original text’s thematic meaning and esthetic value; whether atranslator has a full understanding of the original text’s narration type or not is a wayof judging whether the translation is a success or not; narratology should be used toprovide guidance for practical literature translation appreciation as well as translationcriticism. In the mean time, this thesis intends to invite other people’s valuable ideason the criticism of Hongloumeng translation.