A Report On The Chinese Back-translation Of Florence And Isabel McHugh's English Version Of Hongloumeng

Under the guidance of Newmark's communicative translation theory,the author conducted a translation practice by the experience of back-translating into Chinese one of the popular English adapted translations of the eighteenth century Chinese classical vernacular Hongloumeng,or Red Chamber Dream,to put it literary.This version,entitled The Dream of The Red Chamber,was translated into English by Florence McHugh and Isabel McHugh from Franz Kuhn's German adaptation of the Chinese 120 chapter novel,i.e.Der Traum der roten Kammer(1932).Published in New York by Pantheon Books Press,the English version consists of 50 chapters and amounts to 260,000 words.Covered by linen,it includes 4 pages of Kuhn's preface in English,one page of the translators' annotation and 25 Chinese traditional woodcut pictures.The Chinese back-translation results in 258,000 words all together.Taking as both example and data Chapter 32 and 33,this report reflects on the experience of this translation experiment.The original text of these two chapters has 11,573 English words in all and the total number of the Chinese characters of the back-translation amounts to 11,274 characters.This task is a practice of a rootless back-translation,the objective of which is to see whether the resultant back-translation can go back to the original Chinese story faithfully.In this process,the author tries to compare and contrast both the English text and her own translation with the text of the original Chinese novel,with an aim to inspect to what extent the adapted English version(and its German “original”)differs from the Chinese novel both in terms of language and culture.This report is composed of five parts.It begins with a description of the translation task,including the source of the translation material,a brief introduction of the text and the significance of the translation task.The translation process is the second part,which covers the preparations,the research of the translation methods,the theoretical bases and the translation process.The key part is the case analysis,in which the author selects a number of representative examples for case analysis,focusing on the translation of cultural terms and translation strategies the author used.The fourth part summaries the difficulties encountered in the translation process and their solutions.And the experience and lessons learned from this task form the last part of the report.Through the back-translation of the Mchughs' s The Dream of The Red Chamber,the author realizes that though it is never an easy job to translate a literary work,the Chinese back-translation,which undertakes the responsibility to rebuild the nation images of China,is more challenging.As for the back-translation of classics,a significant task is to evoke the cultural identity of the readers.To achieve these goals,in addition to professional attitudes and solid bilingual knowledge,deepening the understanding of both cultures is necessary as well,so that source and target languages can be transformed freely.