A Comparison On Culture Factors' Translation Between Two English Versions Of Honglou Meng (the First 80 Chapters)

In the developing history of Chinese novel Honglou Meng plays the role of ending an old era and opening a new one. Its author, Cao Xueqin, ascends to the world's literature summit a century earlier than other great writers such as Tolstoy, Balzac and Dickens. The novel is closely connected with Chinese culture. Whenever Chinese culture is mentioned, people would think of Honglou Meng or vice versa.Honglou Meng spreads to all over the world with the development of cultural exchanges between China and other countries. Up till now it has been translated into English and more than a dozen of other languages. But most of them are abridged editions. Among these translations, two complete English versions are most popular: one published in Beijing under the title of A Dream of Red Mansions by Yang Xianyi and his wife Gladys Yang, and the other in Britain entitled The Story of the Stone by David Hawkes and John Minford (the first 80 chapters is translated by Hawkes).Different cultures will be inevitably exchanged and conflicted in the social development to some extent, so as to pose problems in translation. It is just as Eugene A. Nida points out in his book Language, Culture and Translating:... 'for truly successful translating, biculturalism is even more important than bilingualism, since words only have meanings in terms of the cultures in which they function.' The problems posed by the diversity of cultures are showed as follows: zero of equivalent word, conflict of word meaning, semantic association, pragmatic implication, and difference of national psychology.The novel Honglou Meng is said to be a great encyclopedia of Chinese culture, because it involves nearly every aspects of the culture. Nida once classified cultural factors in translation into five parts, i.e. ecology, language, religion, material and society. In the translation of cultural factors, the Yangs prefer to adoptforeignization translation and semantic translation, and Hawkes domestication translation and communicative translation. Domestication and foreignization are two different but complementary techniques used in the translation of cultural factors. The former is TL culture oriented, emphasizing the idiomatic expressions of the target language and against using those of the source language. But the latter is just opposite. Semantic translation attempts to render, as closely as the semantic and syntactic structures of the target language allow, the exact contextual meaning of the original. Communicative translation attempts to produce on its readers an effect as close as possible to that obtained on the readers of the original. It shows that no matter in Western countries or in China, the discussion on domestication and foreignization both underwent a long history, mainly focusing on language form and cultural factors. In this thesis a comparison will be made on the two principles adopted in the translation of cultural factors.Whether domestication or foreignization, each has its own merits and demerits, depending on different purposes and readers. TheYangs' version, tending to introduce Chinese culture to the foreigners, is helpful to those who want to learn Chinese culture. However, Hawkes' purpose is to entertain the English readers by making the novel as readable as possible. So the two techniques bring to different effect. There are many differences and similarities between semantic translation and communicative translation. By comparison, we find that the Yangs' version is close to semantic translation and the Hawkes' communicative translation. It is impossible for any text to be translated by semantic or communicative technique alone. It should be widely overlapping bands of the two methods. A translation can be more or less semantic or more or less communicative-even a particular section or some sentences can be treated more communicatively or less semantically.