On Translating Cultural Expressions Of Hong Lou Meng From Perspective Of Semantics

"Hong Lou Meng", a great Chinese classical novel, embraces the profound and brilliant Chinese culture and folk customs that have been greatly influential in the history of exchanging cultures between the East and the West.There are a great many literary forms and special cultural expressions in this classical novel, such as allusions, idioms, proverbs,"Xie Hou Yu"(two-part allegorical sayings), vulgarisms, etc. All these have specialty and complexity. In order to make this novel understood and accepted by the Westerners, here is a high demanding work of translating these cultural expressions into English. This thesis tries to carry out a convincing study on these expressions from the points of theory, technique and artistic value.There are two English versions of"Hong Lou Meng". One is translated by Yang Hsien-Yi and Gladys Yang and the other is translated by David Hawkes and John Minford. Each of them has its own merits in reproducing the special cultural expressions. From a new perspective, this thesis tries to integrate Peter Newmark's semantic translation theory with the translation practice of the cultural expressions in"Hong Lou Meng"by comparing the versions of Yang and Hawkes.