A Contrastive Study On The Translation Of Poetic Quotations In Hong Lou Meng From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Hong Lou Meng, as one of the four Chinese greatest masterpieces, has attracted the attention of translators and scholars from home and abroad. Hawkes and Minford’s and the Yang’s versions have become the hottest object of study. A review of the history of the study on the translation of Hong Lou Meng shows that the poems composed by Cao Xueqin, cultural elements, specific terms, figures of speech, idioms, the history of translation of Hong Lou Meng and the like are usually the center of attention. However, the translation of poetic quotations in the novel has been rarely studied. Hence this thesis takes the translation of poetic quotations in Hong Lou Meng as the object of study and conducts a contrastive analysis of examples from the two above-mentioned versions.Relevance theory occupies an important position in linguistics and plays an important role in interpreting language phenomena. It states that communication is an ostensive-inferential process in nature. Gutt, a famous linguistic scholar, applied it to the study of translation and attracted other scholars’ attention to the new area. Relevance theory opened a brand new view for translation study. The relevance-theoretical translation approach states that translation is a motive ostensive-inferential activity, that is to say, a communicative action relating to informational intentions and communicative intentions. In the process of translation, there exist two ostensive-inferential processes: one is that the author manifests the informative intention to the translator, and the translator, as the audience, obtains the author’s intentions through optimal relevance between the original information and the translator’s cognitive context, which is acquired through the translator’s cognition; the other one is that the translator as the communicator chooses proper translation strategies in the translated version to manifest the original information to the readers, and the readers of the translated version makes the least processing efforts to acquire optimal relevance according to the information in this version and the cognitive context, in order to know the author’s communicative intention and realize the communicative purpose.This thesis collects 48 examples of poetic quotations from Hong Lou Meng with their respective translation of Yang Xianyi and Glays Yang and David Hawkes and John Minford. It takes relevance theory as the theoretical support and sums up strategies for translating poetic quotations by analyzing and contrasting the two translations. By doing so, it aims to judge if they found optimal relevance and realized the communicative intension. Based on the analysis, the thesis summarizes the strategies for translating poetic quotations in Hong Lou Meng. It is hoped that these findings can be of some guidance in translating poetic quotations in other literary works.