A Target-Oriented Study On The Translation Of Simile In Hawkes' The Story Of The Stone

This research applies a target-oriented approach, which is rarely used in traditional studies. Gideon Toury first puts forward this approach in his theory and employs it in the study of metaphor translation. Preliminary study shows that for the purpose of making target readers better understand source cultures, target-text metaphors are not all translated from source-text metaphors. Some of them are translated from similes, while others are translated from other figurative speech due to cultural differences between the source language and the target language. This kind of research method can not only cover the results that are obtained from traditional studies, but also discover some new problems that fail to be detected in traditional studies. Therefore, this approach enlarges the study scope and broadens the translation perspective as well.The above-mentioned phenomenon also exists in Hawkes'The Story of the Stone. Some similes are translated from similes, some from metaphors, some from other figurative speech and still others from Hawkes'very own creation. Considering the unity of the style of translation, this thesis aims to focus its study merely on the first 80 chapters of Hawkes'The Story of the Stone. With the aid of parallel corpus, this thesis attempts to find out whether this phenomenon extensively exists in The Story of the Stone through a scientific approach and probe Hawkes'translation strategies for simile.The major findings of this research are presented as follows:1. Some of the similes in Hawkes'version are translated from similes, some from metaphors, some from sense, some similes plus sense are translated from sense, others are sense plus similes translated from sense, and still others are translated from zero.2. There is a significant difference among Hawkes'translation strategies for simile. Simile translated from simile is his dominating translation strategy.3. There are some mistranslations and over-translations in Hawkes'translations of simile. Key Words:The Story of the Stone; Simile; Target-oriented; Translation; Strategy...