Comparison Of Two English Translations Of Honglou Meng

HongLou Meng is widely regarded as one of the greatest literary works which contain wideconceptions and artistic ideas. There are different translations in different languages for HongLouMeng.And there are two successful English versions which are universally accepted: one is translatedby Chinese translator Yang Hsien-yi and his wife Gladys Targaret Tayler, the other by British translatorDavid Hawkes.In the traditional conception of translation, the original work and the author dominate the wholeprocess of the translation. That is, the translation must be accurate and faithful to the original. Thetranslators have limited freedom to express subjective ideas that reflect their own thoughts. Thetranslators are “invisibility”. In the twentieth century, Western philosophy began to change this situation,which is called as “the pragmatic turn”. Heideger and Gadamer are the pioneers in the Hermeneutics.They took root the understanding of historicity and the determination of the meaning. A greatinspirations from them have been gained to the new research of literary translation. Hermeneuticsprevailed over Western philosophy and cultural thoughts in the late1960s. The translationalhermeneutics has its own period, represented by Schleiermacher and Dilthey, dating back to the firsthalf of19thcentury to1960s. The aim of traditional translation theory is to pursue the very “correctmeaning” of the original text. Until the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger has transferred thehermeneutics from methodology and epistemology into ontology research. Hans-Georg Gadamer hascombined the ontology of Martin Heidegger with classical hermeneutics and developed philosophicalhermeneutics into philosophy school. His main principles can be found in his Truth and Method. Theprinciples involve all interpretation process. Gadamer pointed the three principles, that is Historicity ofUnderstanding, Fusion of Horizon and Effective History. The thesis applies the three main ideas ofGadamer’s Truth and Method to the analysis the translations in HLM’s two English versions.The thesis is divided into five chapters: The first chapter is a brief introduction of the researchbackground, significance of the thesis.The second part is literature review of translation in HongLouMeng. This part is a brief description of the two English versions and the two versions’ background, andalso the difficulty in translation. The third chapter is a brief introduction of philosophical hermeneutics,and the theoretical elaboration. Under the guidance of the three principles of hermeneutics, the thesisanalyzes different versions, mistranslations, cultural filtration and the necessity of re-translation. The fourth chapter is the core of the thesis, the main principles of Gadamer is applied to analyzing andstudying the two English versions. The fifth chapter is the conclusion part which sums up the wholethesis and gives some implications for future study. From the sense of the hermeneutics, we can find Y﹠Y’s version has fused the horizon of the original text better. H﹠M’s has done well in fusing thehorizons of the target language and readers. The two versions have shown the effect of history.