A Comparative Study Of English Translation Of Animal Idioms In Hong Lou Meng From The Perspective Of Eco-Translatology

Animal idioms are loaded with both the same and different cultural connotations between Chinese and western cultures. And the cultural differences make the translation of animal idioms be a hand nut for a long time. Many scholars have conducted their research on it from different theoretical perspectives with the purpose of finding out the translation methods of animal idioms. Eco-translatology, as a new ecological paradigm to translation studies, offers a brand new interpretation to the process, principle, method and evaluation criteria of translation while it has not been applied to the study of the translation of animal idioms.In Hong Lou Meng animal idioms are used quite frequently. It is typical to take the animal idioms in this work as research objects. Therefore, this thesis draws examples of animal idioms with different cultural connotations in Hong Lou Meng and their translation in its two English versions. One is the version translated by Yang Xianyi and his wife, and the other is by Hawkes and his student. First of all, the writer employs the "three-dimensional transformations" in Eco-translatology to analyze the similarities and differences in the translation methods of animal idioms adopted in these two English versions; then taking the translators’ translational eco-environment into account, the writer works out the reasons for the differences; and lastly the writer evaluates the translation of animal idioms in these two versions in terms of the three reference values (degree of multi-dimensional transformation, translator quality and readers’feedback) in the "translation criteria" of Eco-translatology. It is hoped that this study can verify the explanatory power of Eco-translatology to different kinds of translation and put forward the translation methods of animal idioms from the perspective of "three-dimensional transformations" and accordingly shed light on the teaching and practices of the translation of animal idioms in future.Through analysis, the conclusion is obtained:The appearance of different translation to the same animal idioms in these two versions is due to that the translators adapt themselves to the different internal and external translational eco-environment they are living in at first and then make different selections on the prominence of the linguistic, cultural and communicative dimensional factors loaded in the animal idioms. And after exploring the different readers’ feedback to the translation by means of the questionnaire survey, a conclusion about the translation methods of animal idioms from the angle of the "three-dimensional transformations" is also drawn in this thesis, which helps us recognize the deficiency of the translation of animal idioms in both of the two English versions to some degree. In a word, Eco-translatology, a new ecological approach to translation study, is of universal applicability, which can offer us a new perspective in exploring the characteristics and nature of translation.