On The Study Of Textual Reconstruction In Chinese-English Translation—Exemplified By Yang’s Translatioin Of Hongloumeng

With the development of text linguistics, the research perspectives on translationhave been highly broadened. The focus of studies has gradually been changed from thelevel of sentence to text. Based on the research results of text linguistics, text translationprovides a new perspective for the translation research. Since English and Chinesebelong to different language systems, and owing to their distinctions in cultures,thinking modes and language expressions, the text structure of these two languages isdifferent. Therefore, how to cope with these differences in the process of translation isan important problem needs to be resolved in text translation.This paper mainly talks about the textual reconstruction in Chinese-Englishtranslation with the examples of Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang’s translation ofHongloumeng. It first discusses the significance and necessity of textual reconstructionfrom three differences between Chinese and English text, namely text features, thinkingmodes and cultures. Then it analyzes textual reconstruction in Yang’s translation ofHongloumeng from seven aspects: culture, narrative structure, narrative point of view,layout information, subject/topic conversion, space and time sequence and textcanonical form. It also concludes some translation methods of textual reconstruction inYang’s translation, such as division and combination, addition and omission, conversionand inversion, substitution and explanation, having the hope that it could be useful forthe future translation of other literary works in Chinese-English translation.The paper is divided into six parts. The first part is the introduction, which brieflydescribes the background, purpose, significance, method and structure of the paper.Literature review is the second part. It makes a concise review on the definitionsand researches of text, text translation and textual reconstruction.The third part explores the significance and necessity of textual reconstructionfrom the perspective of contrast between Chinese and English text. Due to thedifferences in text features, differences in thinking modes and differences in culturesbetween Chinese and English, each of the language has its own way to organize asentence or text. Thus textual reconstruction is a quite necessary translation strategy.The forth part is the most important part in this paper. It takes some typicalexamples from Hongloumeng and its English version A Dream of Red Mansions todiscuss the specific expressions of textual reconstruction from seven aspects inChinese-English translation.The fifth part concludes some basic and general translation methods in Yang’stranslation of Hongloumeng. These methods are not used independently, but could becombined together and applied flexibly.The last part is the conclusion, which sums up the previous parts and ideas. It alsopoints out the limitations and future research directions of the paper.