Comparing The Two English Versions Of Hong Lou Meng

There have always been controversies over translation theories, especially that of literary works. By analyzing the different opinions of the application of Relevance Theory to translation studies, the thesis attempts to explore a so-called universal theory of translation to see whether there is a MUST and POSSIBILITY to set up a single universal theory in translation practice.Relevance Theory (RT), first put forward by Sperber and Wilson in their joint work Relevance: Communication and Cognition in 1986, is a basic pragmatic theory related to verbal communication. It considers verbal communication as an ostensive -inferential process, and focuses on cognition and communication. As soon as it was proposed, RT has been exerting great influence on many fields such as linguistics, literature, philosophy, psychology etc, especially on the study of translation. Wilson's student Gutt has successfully introduced RT into translation and elaborated his brand-new theory - Relevance Translation Theory (RTT) - in his dissertation Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context.After reviewing works related to RT and a large amount of research materials in relevant application into translation, the author has found fierce disputes over the problem mentioned above. Some claim that RT provides a universal theoretical framework for translation while others forcefully point out the limitations of RT in explaining some translating phenomena. With respect to this, this thesis makes a tentative study by conducting a comparative analysis on some excerpts of the two English versions of a masterpiece in Chinese literary history, Hong Lou Meng. Finally the author finds that most scholars have said something important for translation studies, but they are all biased to some extent for they emphasize certain aspects of translating process but ignore the others. The author further concludes that no single universal theory can account for the complicated process of translation, especially literary translation. Therefore, when doing translating work, we should try hard to find the appropriate theory that can be best applied to the specific cases of translation and that can help better convey both the informative and the communicative intentions from the original works to the target readers.