A Comparative Study On The Mistranslation Of The Addressing Terms Between The Four English Versions Of Hongloumeng:from The Perspective Of Context Theory

Hongloemeng, one of Chinese ancient literature pinnacles, covers almost every aspect of Chinese culture. In recent years, much study by experts has been carried out and translation of addressing terms has been spotlighted as a branch of Hongloumeng medio-translatology. Researchers like Chen Yiping and Yan Yidan have a large amount of research in the translation of addressing terms from different perspectives. Most of these studies, however, focused much upon translation strategies and comparative research of addressing terms in Hongloumeng. And few research on mistranslation of addressing terms were found as researchers comprehended the translation of addressing terms less meanwhile there were no effective criteria for the judgment of the mistranslations.Nowadays, it is the right time to probe into the mistranslations of addressing terms because the systematic research on translation of addressing terms have been conducted by Chen, Yan and so forth. Therefore, the author considered the context theory as the theoretical foundation and connected the previous studies with the mistranslations. The findings are as follows:Firstly, context theory as an effective way is very useful in translation research since the three sorts of contexts, linguistic, situational and cultural, providing the panorama of text to the translators. In that case, a reasonable criterion of mistranslation in addressing terms can be established on the foundation of context theory.Secondly, the classification of the mistranslations in addressing terms can be completed on the basis of the context theory.Thirdly, it is a systematic method to maintain the criterion, classification and comparative analysis as a whole to conduct research on the mistranslation.Fourthly, even the four English versions are very different from each other, they do have common characteristics in the mistranslations of addressing terms-most of the mistranslated terms are referring to women. Moreover, the terms referring to "王熙凤" are most likely mistranslated in all the four versions.