The Translation Of Hong Lou Meng From The Perspective Of Post-colonial Theory

Translation is not only a simple conversion between two languages,but also a communication between two cultures.From the late 1960s to the early 1970s,the western theoretic study of translation shifted from the unit of words,sentences to the unit of text.In the 1980s,after completing the "cultural tun,translation study then combined with post-colonial theory,which makes translation study go beyond the restriction of language conversion and start to research translation from the perspective of politics,power and etc.What post-colonialism translation theory focuses on is the translation activity under different historical conditions,the power operation hidden behind the translation,and the unequal relationship between power and discourse as well.The historical mission of post-colonialism is to relieve colonization and eliminate cultural hegemony and cultural imperialism.The post-colonial translation theory not only reveals the essence of cultural exploitation,but also actively advocates the cultural diversity in the world,making an important contribution to the development of cultural equality between the East and the West.In view of this,this thesis analyzes two English translations of Hong Lou Meng,by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang and by David Hawkes,from the perspective of post-colonialism,and explore their translation of cultural elements in Hong Lou Meng from aspects of material culture and spiritual culture.In the analysis of the contents of material culture,this thesis selects architecture,costume,diet and traditional Chinese medicine these four types of contents with typical Chinese traditional cultural characteristics as the analysis samples.When analyzing the contents of spiritual culture,poetry,common saying and religion,three aspects with great differences between China and the west,are selected.What’s more,the difficulties faced by third world in translating and introducing classical literature works are also discussed.The thesis consists of five parts.Chapter one discusses the post-colonial translation theory,the background of Hong Lou Meng and its author,as well as comment of two versions.Chapter two presents literature review on Hong Lou Meng and post-colonial theory.Chapter three makes the theoretical analysis of the two versions within the theoretical framework of postcolonial translation theory.Chapter four deals with several case studies on two translations of Hong Lou Meng in post-colonial context from the perspective of the material culture and spiritual culture.Finally,Chapter five concludes the thesis.