On Representing The Beauty Of Dai-yu’s Sentiments In Translation From Translation Aesthetics Perspective

Hong Long Meng, one of the four greatest classical novels in China, is unfolded by the love story between Bao-yu and Dai-yu. Therefore, the writer devotes much of its energy to depicting Dai-yu, in which the most attractive description is the description of Dai-yu’s sentiments, including her passionate love of Bao-yu, jealousy towards Bao-chai, poetic sentiment, and her sentimentality of nature.The description of Dai-yu’s sentiments by the author has contributed much to the description of her beauty, and is the embodiment of her personality. Its aesthetic values are pervasive in the whole novel. In the process of translation, whether the translated version can represent the beauty of Dai-yu’s sentiments successfully will affect both the success of the translation of the novel and the interest and taste of the target readers to the novel.Aesthetics, a branch of philosophy concerned with the study of the idea of beauty, studies the sense of beauty and people’s feelings of it. Translation aesthetics is an evaluation system in which the aesthetic theory is employed in the theory and practice of translation. It is also the aesthetic criteria involved with representing the sense of beauty in literary translation, aiming to analyze, interpret and solve the aesthetic problem in inter-linguistic transference. Many scholars have devoted themselves to the study of the theory, such as Fu Zhongxuan, Fang Mengzhi, Liu Miqing, Mao Ronggui, Xi Yongji, and so on.The major components of translation aesthetics are mainly composed of translation aesthetic object, translation aesthetic subject, translation aesthetic conscious system and methods of aesthetic representation. With the principle of domestication contemplation and foreignization reference, the theory tries to dig into the Chinese classical art aesthetic thought to guide the translation theory and practice by setting feet on a distinctive Chinese cultural feature.This thesis attempts to employ the theory of translation aesthetics to contrast the methods of representing the beauty of Dai-yu’s sentiments in Hawkes’ and Yang’s versions at the phonetic, lexical, syntactical levels. It hopes that the thesis can be helpful to the handling of representing the sense of beauty in translation practice.This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One introduces its research background and significance, research methods and questions, and the structure of the whole thesis. Chapter Two is the review of the relative study on the translation of Hong Lou Meng and on the ways in which the beauty of Dai-yu and her sentiments are represented at home and abroad. In Chapter Three, the framework of the theory, translation aesthetics, is introduced. Chapter Four mainly focuses on the contrast of the methods for representing the beauty of Dai-yu’s sentiments in the two versions respectively by Hawkes and Yang. The last chapter is the conclusion.