Translation By Bonsall Of Culturally Indigenous Concepts In Hongloumeng From Conceptual Mapping Theory Perspective

As a famous classical novel in Chinese literature works, Hongloumeng contains profound connotations of Chinese traditional cultures. Since1830s, it has been translated into English with several versions, among which the translation accomplished by Bonsall in1950s is the first complete English version before the Yangs’ and Hawkes’s versions. Bonsall independently finished the translation of Hongloumeng with complete structure including notes on some special terms, notes in the event of publication, translator’s foreword, contents, notes and appendix of genealogical tables and all characters’names and their relations. Taking the cultural difference and gap causing difficulties and confusion for target readers into consideration, the translator tries to be faithful to the source text and preserve the original flavor of Chinese culture, which thoroughly reflects Bonsall’s devotion to Hongloumeng’s translation. Without referring to much materials and discussing with other scholars, Bonsall completed the translation of this novel, which offers more study subjects in this field and contributes to the transmission of this novel and Chinese cultures to the world.Based on Bonsall’s English version of Hongloumeng, the thesis aims at probing into the translation strategies and their distributional tendencies in the rendering process of culturally indigenous concepts, i.e., idioms, etiquettes and customs, and religions in the light of He Yuanjian’s conceptual mapping theory. What’s more, the author compares the observations in the present study with Ling Bing’s exploration of the Yang’s translation of Hongloumeng so as to testify conceptual mapping theory.First of all, the author discusses about culturally indigenous concepts in Hongloumeng in detail, i.e., idioms, etiquettes and customs, and religions, and explores the translation approaches adopted by Bonsall in rendering the three culturally indigenous concepts and their distributional frequency in the view of conceptual mapping theory by He Yuanjian proposing that transplantation, paraphrasing, substitution and deletion take place in the translation cognitive process when conceptual mapping is blocked. Then a comparative study is carried out on strategy use in Bonsall’s translation of indigenous concepts and that of the Yangs to point out the similarities and differences of strategies in dealing with cultural factors of this novel and figure out the possible reasons. In addition, based on the Bonsall’s translation of Hongloumeng, the author puts forward other translation approaches in rendering culturally indigenous concepts except transplantation, paraphrasing, substitution and deletion.By exploring the complete English version by Bonsall, this thesis improves translation study of Hongloumeng and it is of practical significance on the study of the translation of cultural factors in the novel and conceptual mapping theory.