The Study On The Representation Of The Spirit Of Place Of Prospect Garden In David Hawkes' The Story Of The Stone

Hongloumeng,as the masterpiece of describing of classical Chinese gardens,reflects the author Cao Xueqin's great literary creativity and excellent language ability through those ingenious garden structures and its profound meanings.Among the fictional constructions in the novel Hongloumeng,the literary creation of Prospect Garden is the most successful.Exactly as Gu Pingdan,a prestigious redologist,said,“Cao Xueqin presented the magnificence of classical Chinese gardens through the description of Prospect Garden,and furthermore he created Prospect Garden as an environment which was related to the activities of characters and plots for the novel Hongloumeng.”Prospect Garden is endowed with a sort of invisible force which promotes evolution of plots and influences the destinies of characters,because of a certain atmosphere in its internal space.Nevertheless,the atmosphere of Prospect Garden has been to some extent lost in David Hawkes' The Story of the stone,one of the English versions of Hongloumeng.This thesis explores the atmosphere of Prospect Garden through the adoption of Christian Norberg-Schulz's The Spirit of Place,and also analyzes Hawkes' translation through the usage of Lawrence Venuti's Domestication and Foreignization,a translation theory.Based on analyses of some specific examples in the aspects of space,natural images and artificial images which are three elements of The Spirit of Place,this thesis discusses whether the spirit of place of Prospect Garden is represented in Hawkes' version;and if it does,to what extent the spirit of place is retained and how it is reproduced.This paper also explores what the general translation strategy,method and technique for the architectural translation are.After the exploration,three major findings are obtained: 1)The spirit of place of Prospect Garden is the complex type,but that The Story of Stone does not completely represent the spirit of place of Prospect Garden.About forty-six percent of the spirit of place of Prospect Garden is represented in Hawkes' version of Hongloumeng;2)When Hawkes' The Story of the Stone represents forty-six percent of the spirit of place,Hawkes mainly adopts domestication as a primary strategy and foreignization as a secondary strategy,paraphrase and literal translation as main translation methods and imitation as a subsidiary translation method,and addition,semantic shift,level shift and syntactic shift as primary translation techniques,and omission,division and lexical shift as secondary translation techniques;3)Nevertheless,the degree of representation of the spirit of place of Prospect Garden under the foreignizing strategy is higher than the level of representation under the domesticating strategy,under literal translation higher than under paraphrase,under semantic shift higher than under level and syntactic shift and addition.Hence,this thesis proposes that when the translators tackle architectural translation,they should adopt foreignizating strategy as a main strategy,and domesticating strategy as a subsidiary strategy,use literal translation as a primary translation method and paraphrase as a secondary translation method,and employ semantic shift as a primary translation technique,level shift and syntactic shift as secondary translation techniques,and addition as a tertiary translation technique.Eventually,this research is hoped to provide some enlightenment for both the study on the translation of fictional constructions and the research on The Spirit of Place theory,and promote the spread of Chinese culture in the Western world.