A Study On David Hawkes' Concept Of Translation In Hongloumeng: From The Perspective Of Delabastita's Pun Translation Thoery

Hongloumeng is considered as the peak of Chinese classic novel and the encyclopedia of Chinese culture and language. The author Cao Xueqin, in order to disguise his family stories and the historical facts in the novel, employed various devices such as symbols, wordplays, etc. whose translation poses a challenge to the translators of the novel. David Hawkes, one of the English translators of Hongloumeng, writes in the introduction of the first volume of his translation The Story of the Stone that his one abiding principle has been to translate everything—even puns, from which we can conclude that he has made an effort to treat the translation of puns. So this thesis is going to investigate his concept of translation by analyzing the strategies he has adopted to translate puns within the framework of Delabastita's pun translation theory.Traditional view is that puns are not worthy of time and efforts to study. But Delabastita disapprove of it. He argues that the translation of puns can blur the line between translation and adaptation, pushing translators to extremes and go out of their usual way to tackle puns, from which their concept of translation can be revealed.The notion that the pun is untranslatable has been around for a long time, but Delabastita does not agree upon it. He believes that the translation of puns can be achieved if a translator translates out of pragmatic considerations. It is true that many puns cannot be transposed in other languages, but with modification, their transfer can be obtained by various means. On the basis of his study on the translation of Shakespearean puns, Delabastita proposes a series of techniques for translators to treat puns: PUN INTO PUN, PUN INTO NON-PUN, PUN INTO RELATED RHETORICAL DEVICE, PUN INTO ZERO, DIRECT COPY, NON-PUN INTO PUN, ZERO INTO PUN, and EDITORIAL TECHNIQUE. These techniques can be further divided into two categories: adequacy-oriented and acceptability-oriented strategies.By examining the techniques a translator adopts to translate puns, his concept of translation can be revealed that whether he is adequacy-oriented or acceptability-oriented. Besides, whether the translator attaches importance to the literariness of a text or literal equivalence can also be reflected by examining whether he takes a PUN INTO PUN or PUN INTO NON-PUN approach.Puns in Hongloumeng can be classified into four categories: puns on place names, puns on personal names, puns in poems and verses and puns in conversations. After analyzing his strategies of translating puns, the results show that Hawkes attaches more importance to the literariness of the text than literal equivalence and lays stress on both the acceptability and adequacy of the target text.