A Comparative Study Of The Translating Styles Of Two English Versions Of Hong Lou Meng From The Perspective Of Translation Aesthetics

Hong Lou Meng, written by Cao Xueqing(?1715-?1763), a novelist in Qing Dynasty, is one of the four great Chinese traditional novels. He has ups and downs in life and feels the fickleness of the world, but he has presented in the novel his complex aesthetics as that of an ancient Chinese nobleman, stressing perceptual experience of beauty that features a unique writing style of Chinese aesthetics. So translation of Hong Lou Meng is of significance for alien readers to know more about China and Chinese cultures. As Hong Lou Meng has lots of descriptions of Chinese traditional cultures,social customs and habits, translators must deal with these descriptions and the styles shown in the process deserve to be researched.This thesis makes a comparative study on two widely accepted English versions of Hong Lou Meng, respectively, David Hawks' The Story of the Stone and Yang Xianyi'The Dream of the Red Chamber. According to the theory of translation aesthetics,different translators hold different translation aesthetics, so they might employ different wording, arranging of paragraphs, and translating strategies in their translations.However, the style markers is formed by arrangement of lexical, syntactic and textual components, and the most basic beauty of language lies in the “optimal lexical collocation”. Thus, in a successful translation, the translator has always tried to represent the beauty in Yinmei(the beauty in sound), Xingmei(the beauty in form), and Yimei(the beauty in poetic imagery) applied by the meaning and image of the original work. This thesis aims at a discovery of the translation aesthetic style used by these two great translators and a discussion of their translation writing style represented.Comparison and discussion has found out that the two translators have employed different translating and writing styles in terms of lexical, syntactic and textural levels with the help of different translation aesthetics. In a word, the aesthetic representation of a translation is conducted by the translator's writing style and personal aesthetics.