A Contrastive Study On Translation Strategies Of Two English Versions Of Hong Lou Meng From The Perspective Of Skopostheorie

Literary translation plays an important role in cross-cultural communication. Due to different purposes of literary translation, translators adopt different translation strategies and methods. The purpose of translation is a quite important factor in translation study. Hans Vermeer puts forward Skopostheorie in the1970s. Skopostheorie has two great contributions to translation theory. The first is the adequacy of translation and the second is to put emphasis on the subjectivity of the translator. The purpose of translation sometimes comes from the client’s requirement, the publisher’s requirement or the translator’s willing.Domestication and foreignization are two opposite and complementary strategies. Recently, it has been a popular topic discussed by scholars and translators at home and abroad. Domestication has been the dominant position for a long time. Foreignization is put forward by German scholar named Schleiermacher in1813. Based on Schleiermacher’s theory, American translation theorist Lawrence Venuti supports foreignization in one of his works:The Translator’s Invisibilty-A History of Translation. The book focuses on improving the status of translator and the cultural status of minority language. Domestication is the target language and culture oriented whereas foreignization is source language and culture oriented. Domestication and foreignization are complementary translation strategies.This thesis is to make a contrastive study about two English versions of Hong Lou Meng from the perspective of Skopostheorie. The author of this thesis will discuss two English versions of Hong Lou Meng from five aspects, namely, the translation of material culture, social culture, religious culture, ecological culture and linguistic culture-loaded words. From the contrastive study, Yang mainly adopts foreignization to deal with the words and sentences with abundant Chinese traditional culture and his version transmits more Chinese traditional culture. Hawkes mainly adopts domestication to deal with those having abundant Chinese traditional culture. It is easier understood by western readers, but target readers can not appreciate more Chinese traditional culture.