Translation Of The Culture-Loaded Words In Hong Lou Meng -from The Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics

Reception aesthetic is a literature theory, which focuses on the studies of the relationship between reader and text. The main characteristic of reception aesthetic is that the readers play an important role in the whole process of reception of text. In other words, the core of aesthetic theory is the reader-centered position. Likewise a target reader of a translated work cannot be ignored as well. According to the reception aesthetic, a translator should take the reader’s position into consideration and realize the translated text and readers’horizon whether obtain a combination when he deals with literary translation. This thesis compares the translation methods of culture-loaded words of Hong Lou Meng using the main concepts of reception aesthetics.The thesis classifies the culture-loaded words of Hong Lou Meng into five categories, the ecological culture-loaded words, the material culture-loaded words, the social culture-loaded words, the religious culture-loaded words and the linguistic culture-loaded words, according to the classification of culture supposed by Nida. Then the author adopts the statistical methods for analyzing the translation methods of culture-loaded words both in Yang and Hawkes’ versions. The statistical results indicate that a translator should adopt the following methods to translate the culture-loaded words so as to combine the horizon of the target language text with that of the target readers as possible as they can:the literal translation and liberal translation for the zero and partial ecological and material culture-loaded words; the replacement for the whole full horizon ecological and material culture-loaded words; the liberal translation plus literal translation for the partial horizon of social culture-loaded words; the literal translation for the zero horizon of social culture-loaded words; the literal translation and literal phus annotation for the religious culture-loaded words; while the liberal translation for the linguistic culture-loaded words.