Translating Culture-specific Elements In Names In Hong Lou Meng:A Comparison Of The Story Of The Stone And The Dream Of Red Mansions

Since Susan Bassnett and Andre Lefevere put forward the “Cultural Turn” in the 1990 s to define the move from translation as text to translation as culture and politics,cultural turn has become an important trendin translation studies.From then on,translation studies put moreemphasis onthe interaction between translation and culture.Furthermore,the names in literature,an important component of culture,are a real challenge for translators who pay close attentionto culture translation.Hong Lou Meng,one of the ‘Four Greatest Classical Novels’,is generally acknowledged as the encyclopedia of Chinese feudalism society for its abundant description of Chinese traditional culture.Names in Hong Lou Meng,crafted to indicate both the development of the storyline and the characteristics of the characters,contain abundant culture-specific elements,which make them difficult to render into English.This thesis first attempts to categorize the culture-specific elements in the names in Hong Lou Meng,and then based on the perspective of compensation for cultural vacancy,has a contrastive study on the translation strategies of names in the two unabridged versions of Hong Lou Meng and explores the similarities and differences in the translation strategies,finally,summarizes the factors that have direct influence on the choice of the strategies of compensation and hopes to shed a light for the translation of names in literature.On the basis of a systematic study on the original work,Hong Lou Meng and its two unabridged versions,the culture-specific elements in the original names are categorized into the following three: Chinese naming,Chinese family hierarchy and Chinese Character.Three strategies of compensation for the culture-specific elements are found to be employed at different levels in the two versions,including on-line compensation,off-line compensation and zero compensation.The strategy of on-line compensation involves semantic translation plus transliteration,transfer and paraphrase in text.Off-line compensation includesannotation out of text,interpretation of names in introduction,note of names in appendix,introduction of characters in appendix and dendrogram of genealogy;Zero compensation includes transliteration,omission,substitution and literal translation.What is more,it is found that the strategies of compensation chosen by translators are influenced by cultural difference and translators’ subjectivity primly.