A Study On The English Version Of Hong Lou Meng By The Yangs

China has a long history and heavy cultural sediment accumulated over the years. Hong Lou Meng (HLM) is one of the greatest literary works in China. It is a political and historical novel with the highest ideological level and artistic quality in the history of Chinese classical literature. After the publication of the complete English versions of HLM, a large number of scholars make research of its translations from different perspectives. The thesis makes the attempt to study the English version of HLM by the Yangs from the perspective of sociosemiotics.According to sociosemiotics, language is a special sign system, and linguistic sign has three kinds of meaning: designative, linguistic and pragmatic meanings. Besides, language has six functions according to Peter Newmark: informative, expressive, vocative, aesthetic, phatic, and metalingual functions, thus the criterion of translation is "correspondence in meaning and similarity in function".Designative meaning is built on the relation of signs to their referents. It always performs the informative function. Generally speaking, Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang have had thorough comprehension of designative meaning of the original HLM. They do their utmost to convey the designative meaning, and they succeed in the transference of designative meaning and informative function.Linguistic meaning is complex;it is built on the relation of signs to each other within the same system. It contains three levels of meaning: phonological, lexical and syntactical level. Alliteration, assonance, rhyme, consonance and meter, reduplication, etc, convey linguistic meaning on the phonological level;pun, syllepsis, parody, zeugma, repetition on the lexical level;antithesis, climax, parallelism, anadiplosis, the length of sentence, the order of sentence, on the syntactic level. Because of the great difference of English and Chinese languages, linguistic meaning is extremely hard to be kept. Thus although the Yangs strive hard for the transfer of linguistic meaning and functions, yet in most cases, linguistic meaning is not well kept in the English version.Pragmatic meaning is built on the relationship of the sign and its interpretant. It is variant, difficult, and often untranslatable element in translation. The author of this thesis analyzes the reproduction of pragmatic meaning in four aspects:1) associative meaning 2)affective meaning 3) stylistic meaning 4) specific pragmatic meaning. At large, the Yangs do well in the transference of pragmatic meaning.HLM is a great encyclopedia of Chinese society. It is extremely complicated and sophisticated, thus, the translating of HLM requires translators' unmatched competence and good command of two languages. The Yangs are very successful in translating the designative meaning and pragmatic meaning. But due to the different characteristics of English and Chinese languages, linguistic meaning in most cases has not been retained.