| Hong Lou Meng is a master of Chinese classical novels, and it is acknowledged as thepeak work of Chinese novels. It has remained a favorite with time since its birth in the middleof18thcentury because of its complicated plot, vivid and impressive characters, elegant andvulgar language materials, a wide rang of knowledge from food, drink, medicines andhousehold architecture, folk wisdom, poetry, drama, mythology, delicate verse, fiction, toclothing and ornaments, customs and etiquette, settings including the layout of each roomwhich are depicting and reflecting every aspect of Chinese culture. After the advent of HongLou Meng, it is not only paid more and more attention by domestic scholars, but impact on alarge number of foreign scholars. Therefore, the influential works has been translated intoforeign languages many times. Among the translated works, there are two well-known fullversions. One is translated under the title of A Dream of Red Chamber by Yang Xianyi and hiswife Gladys Yang, and the other is entitled The Story of the Stone by David Hawkes and JohnMinford (the first80chapters is translated by Hawkes). The chapter titles of Hong Lou Mengnot only have made a brief introduction for each chapter, but have great artistic charming. Thewhole story can be divided into120chapters; the title of each chapter is consisted of arhyming couplet with eight Chinese characters, with the content concise and the structureconsistent. More researches have been made on the two English versions by domestic scholarsand translators ever since their birth one after another in1970s. However, many scholarsmade limited research on the chapter titles of Hong Lou Meng, especially from theperspective of translation ethics.Antoine Berman，a French translation theorist， translator and philosopher，is the firstperson to come up with the concept of ethics of translation. After that, many scholars such asLawrence Venuti, Anthony Pym, Andrew Chesterman and Douglas Robinson etc broughtforward their own viewpoints on translation ethics. For instance, Berman has a bias toforeignization translation, which is to lead the target language readers close to the original textand make them feel something exotic.“Foreignization” and “Domestication” were two termsVenuti came up with in1995, which was also the key point of translation ethics for Venuti. Asfor Pym, he mainly made a further discussion on ethics of translation from the perspective ofculture. Based on previous theoretical research, Chesterman divides the research ontranslation ethics into four models. Robinson tended to modify the schema of translationresearch, rather than put forward any specific translation principles. He made a research onvarious description and summarization of translation ethics in order to present the complexityof translation. Based on these terms such as diversion, aversion, perversion, eversion,reversion, controversy and conversion which were pointed out by Burke and Augustine,Robinson put forward his vertical ethics to analyze the functions of translation throughmodifying Christian concepts, including introversion and extroversion, conversion andadvertising, reversion, subversion, perversion, aversion, diversion, conversation.The thesis, based on Douglas Robinson’s vertical ethics, is of a comparative study on two English versions of Hong Lou Meng. In view of the two translators the writer will studyin the thesis, the writer will mainly focus on the first eighty chapter titles. Through thosecomparisons, Yang centered on the author and the original text and was faithful to the originaltext when translating. Hence, he tends to present introversion ethics, conversion ethics,subversion ethics, perversion ethics and aversion ethics while Hawks tends to presentextroversion ethics, advertising ethics, reversion ethics and diversion ethics, because he waswilling to express his own ideas and satisfied the target language readers’ expectation. Thetwo translators’ ethics are presented from the following four aspects: the translation ofallusions, the translation of character names and the translation of death euphemism and thetranslation of emotional color terms.This thesis consists of a total of five.The first part of the thesis is mainly divided into three parts, which will give a briefintroduction to the background of the research, the significance of the research and thearrangement of the thesis.The second part is a literature review in three sections, giving a general idea of HongLou Meng first, and then introducing the translation of Hong Lou Meng, lastly overviewingdifferent background of the two versions when they were translated.The third part forms the theoretical framework of the thesis that relates to the definitionof ethics of translation and the previous studies on Translation Ethics at home and abroad. Theemphasis is laid on some famous scholars’ theories on translation ethics at home and abroad.The fourth part involves a comparative study of the two English versions of Hong LouMeng, in which five sections are included. The first section mainly discusses thecharacteristics of chapter titles of Hong Lou Meng. The second section expounds DouglasRobinson’s vertical ethics and the fourth section presents the two translators’ different verticalethics when they translated the masterpiece. The last section mainly presents how theintroversion ethics and extroversion ethics conflict by some examples and tries to find reasonsto cause conflict. Among the five sections, the third and fourth sections are the mostimportant, in which the two translators’ different vertical ethics are analyzed from thefollowing four aspects: the translation of allusions, the translation of character names and thetranslation of death euphemism and the translation of emotional color terms. The fourthsection mainly analyzes the reasons why Yang and Hawkes follows different vertical ethicsfrom the following four aspects: different cultural orientation, different purposes of translation,different readers’ expectation, and different translation strategies.The last part is the conclusion of the thesis. |
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