A Study Of Strategies In Translation Of Puns In Hong Loumeng

Adequacy and acceptability are two different translation tendencies in literary translation. They represent two poles of the continuum which relates to the norms used in the translation process. The former refers to adherence to the norms (both linguistic and literary) of the source system, while the latter designates adherence to those of the target system.Puns may be amendable to various forms of interlingual processing, but some kinds of processes are simply not"faithful"enough for the traditional theorists to qualify as"good"or"genuine"translation. The treatment of puns can be most revealing of the translator's basic choice between adequacy and acceptability.There has been a considerable amount of research on the strategies and tendencies observed in the pun translation of Hong Loumeng, but quantitative studies are seldom reported. The present study is designed to make a descriptive study with statistical analyses to investigate translation strategies of puns.In light of previous researchers'work, different methods of translating puns are graded to represent different degrees of adequacy and acceptability. Then, on the basis of the grades, the study first examines the differences in the adoption of the strategies to the puns between two English versions of the Chinese great classic Hong Loumeng (Yang's and Hawkes'), and then investigates the relationship between them.A Mann-Whitney U-test is performed to compare the grades of translation strategies recorded among the randomly selected 50 samples in the two versions. The results show that there is statistically significant difference between the two versions. Furthermore, the study examines the relationship between the two versions by means of correlation analyses, which reveals that the two translations correlate to each other.