Thumbnail Figures, Great Value-on The Cultural Connotations Behind The Biographical Names Of Maids In The Two English Versions Of Hong Lou Meng

According to Xu Gongshi, there are975people in Hong Lou Meng, including732withnames and243not. Being the character description model of Chinese classical novels，theskillfulness of characters’ biographical names in Hong Lou Meng and their profound meaninghave fully reflected the author’s excellent language ability. Exactly as Zhou Chun said,“whenever the author gave biographical names to characters, he was good at metaphor, andthe variation, craftiness of all the biographical names are necessary to be studied”(KongLingbin,2003, p.72).Biographical names are not only the appropriative symbols of individuals, but also aculture. Generally speaking, servants in the feudal hierarchical society have no names, eventhough they have, they are not appealed to refine taste. However, Cao Xueqin endowedbiographical names with plentiful culture to servants, like Yuanyang, Hupo, Moyu, Mingyanand so on. As a specific group in Hong Lou Meng, maids have received distinct names, andsome of them may depict personalities, some of them may reveal destiny, some of them mayexpress the theme, or some of them may seek artistic effect. But during the Chinese-Englishtranslating, cultural connotations contained in the biographical names are to some extent lostand broken.Based on the theoretical framework of Nida’s culture translation, this thesis aims to makea comparative study on the biographical name translating methods applied in the Yangs’ andHawkes’ English versions, so as to make a thorough inquiry on the cultural gain and loss andthe necessity of additional explanations. It shows that during the translating of the maids’biographical names, both the phonetic translation adopted by the Yangs and the liberaltranslation applied by Hawkes cannot successfully reproduce the cultural connotations behindthe biographical names. However, if additional explanations after the two translation methodsare employed, the cultural connotations behind the maids’ biographical names might getsupplements to a certain extent. Through this research, it is hoped to cast some light on thefuture studies both on the translations of biographical names in other literary works, and othercultural-loaded words in literary works.