Study Of Translation For Lantern Riddles

The lantern riddles in Hong Lou Meng have the features of poetic form, propheticalfunction, personification and individuation. Cao depended on this genre to create thecharacters, describe the personalities, reveal the destinies and reflect the culture of ancientsociety. Not only Chinese lantern riddles, but also western folk riddles have the poeticfeatures. They share many common grounds in the aspects of cultural images, rhetoricmethods, rhyme and form, which are translatability of lantern riddles; Nevertheless,Chinese lantern riddles have their unique features, like large amount of culturalinformation, rhetoric devices of Chinese characters and prophetic information. Translatorshave to choose reappear some of these unique features according to their translation goalsand motivations.According to Xu Yuanchong’s poetry translation theory of Three Beauties and FengQinghua’s three guiding principles of lantern riddles, this paper will study the lanternriddles in four English versions of Hong Lou Meng and see what have been done by eachversion to preserve the beauty of sense, sound and form, then provide some inferences tothe translation of lantern riddles in the future.Basing on the studies of this paper, we have the following conclusions:Firstly, in the aspect of sense (guessing clues, cultural and prophetic information):Hawkes mainly adopted the free transaltions. Through the particularization andgeneralization, the guessing clues become explicit, so the degree of connection andmatching between lantern riddle and solution is quite high; Besides that, he also translatedthe implicit object pun of original texts into explicit object pun, which can reserve theprophetic information to some extent; As to the transaltions of images and rhetoric devices,like pun, Yang prefer to the literal translations or transliteration plus annotations, whichcan reserve the most of cultural information, but the amount of prophetic information, thedegree of connection and matching are much lower than those of Hawkes. The version ofJoly also depended on the literal transaltions, but still considered free translations;however, many translations of his version are obviously misunderstanding and the relatedannotations are not provided, which not only cause the loss of cultural information, butalso lower degree of connection and amount of prophetic information. Some translationsare even word-to-word translations, so the degree of loyalty of Bonsall version is the highest one. Although many cultural annotations are provided, many sentences are notintelligible, which further lower the degree and amount.Secondly, in the aspect of sound (rhyme): Almost every riddles in Hawk’s is rhymedand various rhyme schemes are adopted; the number of rhymed riddles in Yang’s ranksonly second to Hawkes’ and only one scheme exists; the rhymed riddles in Joly’s are farless than Yang’s, however, not only end rhyme, but also alliteration appears in his version;most of riddles in Bonsall’s are not rhymed.Thirdly, in the aspect of form (macro and micro): The macro aspect means that linesof translated riddles are regular and fixed, micro aspect means the syllables of each lineare equal or similar. In Hawkes’ version, most riddles have the fixed lines and the similarsyllables of each line; all the riddles of Yang’s maintain the layout of four or eight lines,but the syllables of each line greatly vary; the lines of Joly’s and Bonsall’s are not regular,only Joly’s has the equal or similar syllables in one riddle.In the aspects of sense, sound and form, Chinese lantern riddles and English poeticriddles share many common grounds, which means the translations of former riddles canrefer to the features of latter riddles; However, Chinese lantern riddles also have someunique features, which means the annotations within and beyond the texts can be used tocompensate the losses of cultural and prophetic information.