Rewriting And Manipulation In The Translation Of Hong Lou Meng

The “Cultural Turn” in literary study first emerged in the 1970 s in western world and gradually assumed its dominant role. Then it further expanded to other related fields. As an essential part in literary study, translation study is also greatly changed with the development of the “Cultural School”. Scholars in this school mainly focus on the cultural background and the impact on a translation. As a representative figure of this school, André Lefevere puts forward the idea "translation as rewriting"(Lefevere,2010:xv), stressing that translation studies should not only pursue "equivalence" on the linguistic level, but also pay more attention to the cultural and social factors of a translation, and the choice of the translator. He argues that it is reasonable that translation may not always completely reflect the original, for it is not made in vacuum. In his eyes, the translator is always manipulated by various social and cultural factors: the dominant poetics, ideology and the patronage, thus he puts forward the idea of “manipulation”. The theory of rewriting and manipulation is seen as a milestone in translation studies.The present paper is composed of five parts. The first part is an introduction to Lefevere’s theory and the structure of this thesis. The second part presents a literature review of the theory and translation studies of Hong Lou Meng. Third, it analyses Lefevere’s contributions to translation theory, such as the shift from a conventional approach to a descriptive approach, his awareness of the value of different translations,and the shift from source text to the target text as the focus. Also, flaws of his theory are summarized in this paper, such as vague definitions of key concepts, and its lack of practical guidance. Questions of researches in China and a new proposal of the application of Lefevere’s theory will also be provided in this part. Part four takes Hong Lou Meng as the case study of Lefevere’s theory. A Dream of Red Mansions by Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang strives to be faithful to the original and preserve Chinese cultural images. On the contrary, The Story of the Stone by David Hawkes holds that the translation is made to be read by westerners with no Chinese culturalbackground, thus he makes subjective changes to appeal to the target reader’s reading taste. In particular, this paper takes The Red Chamber Dream by the Reverend Bramwell Seaton Bonsall in comparative study along with the above two versions,hoping to show in a more comprehensive way the explanatory power of Lefevere’s theory in different translation versions. To make up for the regrets of previous translations, Bonsall makes every effort to fully present the original to the target readers and tries to correspond with the original even word by word. This part mainly discusses the choices of different translators in view of Lefevere’s manipulation and rewriting. Part five draws a conclusion of the study. Based on the above research,some tentative implications are offered, research limitations and suggestions for future studies are provided.Despite its limitations, this paper carries theoretical and practical significance.First, it makes a deeper study into Bonsall’s translation version of Hong Lou Meng,which has not been done enough by scholars; and second, for the research method, it offers a new way to apply Lefevere’s theory to analyse texts, expecting to provide some enlightenment for future application of this theory and further study of translation of Hong Lou Meng.