On Adaptation In Translation Of Chapter Titles In Hong Lou Meng By David Hawkes

Jef Verschueren, the secretary of Belgium International Pragmatics Association,proposes that language use is a process of choice. Based on the hypothesis, he furtherputs forward his theory of language adaptation. Based on adaptation theory, thecurrent thesis discusses every adaptation phenomenon involved in translating HongLou Meng by David Hawkes and John Minford in1986, and the author takes thewhole120chapter titles as the studying subjects.The most successful classic work Hong Lou Meng is one of the representativesof chapter title novels (novels composed by many chapters) in China. It is complete atsemantic level, symmetrical at syntactical level and notion oriented at lexical level.After a statistic analysis, notional words in all parts of speech amount to more than56.89%. As to grammatical level, chapter titles in Hong Lou Meng are mainly in aform of subject-predicate style, that is to say, the style of expression is narration. Atthe same time, they also bear many Chinese cultural connotations. Thesecharacteristics make chapter titles not only full of language aesthetic tastes but alsofull of language powers.After analyzing a great number of adaptation phenomena in Hawkes‘Hong LouMeng, the author finds that translators should take into consideration at both linguisticand non-linguistic aspects from the perspective of readers. To be specific, theadaptation phenomena involved in translating chapter titles in Hawkes‘Hong LouMeng are mostly reflected at lexical level including notional and functional adaptation,syntactical level containing word order and components of sentence, rhetoric levelconsisting of adaptation of figures of speech and parallelism, physical aspects madeup of time and space, social aspects comprising adaptation to religions andappellations, and mental aspects consisting of cognition and aesthetic tastes. Anotherdiscovery is that different adaptations happen with different causes, some is foradapting to the stories, some is for adapting to the literary form, some is for adapting to reader‘s language system or grammatical rules and some is for adapting to reader‘sview of the world etc.Meanwhile, the current thesis also discusses the methods of adaption in thetranslation of Hawkes‘Hong Lou Meng. At last, the author finds that whenever thereare redundancies or vagueness, the translator adopts methods of converting parts ofspeech, rearranging word order and entitling new meaning of words respectfully.