A Comparative Study Of Comedy Translation In The Two English Versions Of HLM From The Perspective Of Newmark’s Translation Theory

Comedy is commonly seen in our daily life, and it brings us a lot of fun."Comedy" contains two main meanings, first, it refers to a kind of artistic form in contrast to tragedy; second, it is an aesthetic concept. People tend to regard comedy as a kind of artistic form and neglect its aesthetic meaning. Comedy novel usually describes comedy elements by means of artistic forms, thus creating comedy effect.As one of the four Chinese classical works, Hong Lou Meng has always been popular among readers. Hawkes’and Yang Xianyi’s versions of Hong Lou Meng are the only two complete versions of it, so they are chosen as research objectives of many papers. Although the novel depicts a tragic story, there exist a great amount of comedy scenes, plots and conversations which play important roles in promoting the plot, portraying the characters and deepening the tragic theme. However, database online reveals that, up to now, few studies on comedy translation of Hong Lou Meng have been found.Debates on translation approaches before Newmark focused on literal translation and free translation. Newmark thought that the distinction of literal translation and free translation was not practical enough, therefore, he put forward the theory of semantic translation and communicative translation. Semantic translation and communicative translation are based on the culture background of the author and target readers, besides, they take the text type of original text into consideration. In this way, the translator is able to choose translation approaches appropriately and make their translation acceptable by readers with different backgrounds and purposes. Considering that Newmark’s theory is of great value in practical, this thesis attempts to make a comparative study of comedy translation of the two English versions of Hong Lou Meng from the perspective of semantic translation and communicative translation.The thesis finds that Yang Xianyi utilizes more semantic translation in comedy translation while Hawkes prefers communicative translation but neither of them adopts merely one approach. They may apply both semantic translation and communicative translation in the same case. So it is concluded that the translator is supposed to take characteristics of the author and target readers into consideration before he decides which approach to use, semantic translation or communicative translation. A comparative study of comedy translation of the novel will promote translation theory research and advance translation skills, and it is also beneficial to spreading the Chinese nation’s splendid traditional culture.