On The Choice Of Strategy For Culture-loaded Translation-A Comparative Study Of Two English Versions Of Honglou Meng

Honglou Meng, first published in 1792, is the greatest of all Chinese classics. Perhaps no other novels, Chinese or foreign, have been enjoyed and discussed by so many people for such a long time. As a classic with eternal glamour, Honglou Meng has generated from Chinese culture and been handed down from generation to generation. To some extent, Honglou Meng has become the representative of Chinese culture. As a result, those who are keen to Chinese culture begin to shift their focuses to the study of Honglou Meng so that this kind of study has gradually become a specialized branch of learning, whimsically referred as "Redology", which is totally uncommon even in the history of world literature.Up to now, Honglou Meng has been translated into about 15 different languages, of which the most outstanding and influential versions are two complete English versions, namely, A Dream of Red Mansions translated by Chinese renowned scholar Yang Xianyi and his wife Gladys Yang and The Story of the Stone by English sinologist David Hawkes and his son-in-law John Minford (Of all, Hawkes translated the first eighty chapters that is the part the thesis mainly focuses on), published by Beijing Foreign Language Press and Penguin Books Ltd. respectively.This thesis discusses what the better choice is in translating heavily culture-loaded works like Honglou Meng by firstly introducing the definition of culture, differences between Chinese culture and western culture and the influence the cultural differences imposing on the translation practice, which clearly indicates that culture is definitely a vital factor that is worthy of being taken into consideration in the process of translation, especially for the literary translation.Then, the thesis shifts its focus mainly to the two specific strategies frequently employed to deal with the culture-loaded translation, those are domestication and foreignization. The former is target language (shorten for TL) oriented, involving the adaptation of the cultural images and syntactic structures and so on in the source language in order to fully satisfy the TL readers while the latter is source language (shorten for SL) oriented, aiming to be as faithful as possible to SL without altering the form and style, especially to culture-based factors. The debates between different schools of scholars on the choice of domestication and foreignization have been all carried on in the past decades, both in China and abroad, but they are not reaching an agreement.This thesis attempts to find out which is the better one by analyzing the culture-loaded examples cited from Honglou Meng. The analysis is conducted in terms of 5 subsystems of culture according to Nida's classification: 1) Ecology 2) Material culture 3) Social culture 4) Linguistic culture 5) Religious culture. Each category is fully discussed by presenting typical examples and giving detailed comparison between two versions.Under the discussion based on many examples from Honglou Meng, it is found that Yangs are inclined to employ foreignization more frequently while David Hawkes prefers domestication at most cases. It is also further concluded, on the basis of specific culture-based examples from Honglou Meng, that both domestication and foreignization are not respectively the only choice, although they are the major ones, of two great translators. In Yangs' version, the translation strategies like adding the footnotes at the end of the book, domestication when it is necessary and free translation in some occasions are all present as a supplement of foreignizing translation. As for Hawkes, his alternative choices include some replacement, foreignization when it is needed and amplification for the strongly culture-based terms. The different choices made by both Yangs and David Hawkes in translation are actually mainly conditioned by their different translation intention and different intended readership.In sum, domestication and foreignization are two complementary strategies. We could not simply regard one as the better choice while the other is not. The application of single-handed domestication or foreignization would never represent the orientation of translation studies. There must be a balance point between the two strategies which is waited to be discovered by the excellent translators.