On English Translation Of Animal Idioms In The Story Of The Stone From The Perspective Of Memetics

In The Story of the Stone,a large number of idioms are used as the language expression means,which have attracted much scholarly attention on idiom translation.However,there are few studies on the English translation of animal idioms.The relevant studies are guided by traditional literary,linguistic and translation theories,mainly involving the evaluation and appreciation of idiom translation skills,or the summary of translation methods based on several translation examples.The current studies emphasize domestication or foreignization in translation,but seldom consider the influence of translation process on the production of translated text.The translation of animal idioms is the cultural fusion of the source text and the target text,which embodies the translator's cultural cognition and translation thoughts.In the process of translation,the translator replicates and imitates the information factors in the target language by decoding the source text.And if necessary,the unique information in the source language culture needs to be expressed through meme variation and meme recombination,thereby promoting the spread of meme in foreign countries.Taking Chesterman's translation memetics as the theoretical foundation,182 animal idioms in the source text Hong Lou Meng and the popular English version of David Hawkes&John Minford as the subjects,this thesis analyzes meme replication and variation in the translation of animal idioms,clarifies how the translator behavior restricts the production of translated text and the spread of memes,and then explores the translation norms and translation strategies of animal idioms.It is found that the translation of animal idioms in the English version of David Hawkes&John Minford is mainly dominated by expectancy norm,accountability norm,communication norm and relation norm.At the syntactic level,strategies such as unit shift,conversion of word class and transformation of sentence structure are adopted.At the semantic level,methods such as abstraction change,emphasis change,and paraphrase are employed,and strategies such as cultural filtering,information change,and coherence change are adopted at the pragmatic level.In view of this,the translation of animal idioms is essentially the product of culture competition among different memes.The overseas promotion of the Chinese novel Hong Lou Meng should attach importance to the spread of strong memes.The thesis consists of six chapters.Chapter one introduces research background,research significance,contents and methods,and the arrangement of the thesis.Chapter two is literature review,which briefly analyzes the previous studies on English translation and idiom translation of The Story of the Stone,and points out the deficiencies of the current research such as adopting outdated theories and neglecting the translation process.Chapter three is theoretical foundation.It outlines the basic concepts of memetics and translation norms in translation memetics,and demonstrates the feasibility of this theory in the translation study of animal idioms.Chapter four and chapter five are the principal parts of the thesis,systematically analyzing the leading meme of animal idiom translation in the English version of David Hawkes&John Minford in terms of expectancy norm,accountability norm,communication norm and relation norm,and discussing the translation strategies of animal idioms at syntactic,semantic and pragmatic levels.Chapter six is conclusion,summarizing the research findings and reflecting on the shortcomings.