A Research On The Character Image Reproduction In The English Version Of "Jinling Panci" From Gestalt Theory

Hong Lou Meng is a shiny pearl in ancient Chinese literature. It is the peak of thedevelopment of ancient Chinese novel. Since it appeared, a special school towards its researchhas been formed as Redology. Meanwhile it has been translated into many languages and spreadin the world wild. The most successful English translations appeared in1970s, namely A Dreamof Red Mansions by Yang Xianyi&Gladys Yang, and The Story of The Stone by David Hawkes&John Minford. The difference is translation style and methods in these versions provide a greatcorpus for us to proceed translation comparison research.This thesis selects Jinling Panci as study target for two reasons as following: first of all,Jinling Panci plays an important even guiding role in the shaping of the characters and the plotof the whole novel; secondly, although there are already many researches about Jinling Panciand its translation, most of them starts from the microscope such as the figure of speech. It is rareto study them as a whole from the perspective of character image. The creativity of this thesislies in the macroscopic analysis on the character image depicted by the source text, which isregarded as a whole. This paper intends to compare the reproduced image and the original imagein two translation versions of Jinling Panci from the perspective of Gestalt view, hoping toprovide a new scope for the traditional translation comments.From the view of Gestalt theory, translation is a process of Image-G actualization, whichincludes two key steps: source text comprehension and target text creation, i.e. a mentalactualization of Image-G and a verbal actualization of Image-G respectively. When we analyzethe source text, we should take it as a whole and realize the mental actualization of Image-G atfirst; then when we review the translation works, we should also regard the target text as a wholeand analyze whether the established image corresponds with the original one. Throughcomparison, Jinling Panci depicts15most outstanding females in Hong Lou Meng and theirfates in the style of picture and verse. From the perspective of Image-G actualization, Hawkes’version reproduces a better image of Qingwen, Xiangling, Daiyu and Baochai, Yuanchun, ShiXiangyun, Yingchun and Xichun; Yang’s version realizes a better verbal actualization ofImage-G of Xiren, Miao Yu, Wang Xifeng and Qiaojie; both Yang and Hawkes reproduce theimage of Tancun successfully and both of them fail in Li Wan; as to Qin Keqing, as the image in source text is very vague, the image actualization is hard to achieve then.In addition, the translators adopted different translation methods in the actualization ofImage-G, such as literal translation, free translation, annotation, abridgment and other translationmethods. Hawkes mostly used second person pronoun to shorten the distance between the readerand the author, while Yang chose third person pronoun to keep the objectivity.With the guidance of the principle of Wholeness and the laws of proximity, similarity,closure, past experience and so on, We could obtain a clearer standard for the reproduction ofcharacter image, which provides a new thought for translation review and criticism.