A Contrastive Study Of Two English Versions Of The Poems In Hongloumeng: A Cultural Contex T Perspective

The poems in Hongloumeng(A Dream of Red Mansions) contain a great deal of Chinese cultural information. Owing to their diverse functions in the whole novel, the poems in Hongloumeng are well favored by many scholars and have been studied from such perspectives as aesthetics, linguistics, ecology, culturology, prosody and so on. However, few people have studied the poems from the perspective cultural context. although cultural context has a great influence on the differences of various translations and the differences of various translations can be well explained from the perspective of cultural context. It is of great significance for the spreading of Chinese culture to analyze different cultural contexts behind different versions of the same source text and different techniques translators adopt to deal with the cultural elements in their translation.Cultural context is an important factor that affects the expression of translation. Both the cultural contexts in the source text itself and relevant social cultural contexts outside the source text may have some effect on its translations. Thirty-eight poems with typical Chinese cultural characteristics are selected for study from the novel Hongloumeng from the perspective of cultural context. Detailed data analyses and comparisons are made on the different versions of the 38 poems produced by David Hawkes and Yang Xianyi& Gladys Yang, with the hope of finding out different cultural contexts behind each translation and the reasons for different translating strategies adopted by different translators. It is proposed that, in such intercultural communication as translation, the translator should not only pay special attention to existing differences between the source and target languages and cultures, but also cater well to the acceptability of alien cultures in the target readers.Considering the features of cultural elements revealed in the 38 selected poems from Hongloumeng, the author adopts the definition of cultural context put forward by Peng Liyuan. And according to Bao Huinan’s and Hu Xingwen’s classification of cultural context, cultural contexts in this thesis are grouped into historical cultural context, geographical cultural context, religious cultural context and custom cultural context. And detailed analyses are made for each subtype of cultural context, with a sequence of introduction, elucidation and summary, to see how and why each type of cultural context has had effects on the expression of the two versions.Analyses show that the Yang’s version is source-culture oriented, in which the expressions are more straightforward and stiff, while Hawkes’ wording is smoother and closer to the target culture and target receivers, with domestication used in most cases and deletion in some cases. As to the acceptability and assessment in the target culture, however, Yang’s version is relatively bad, while Hawke’s version is spoken highly of. The reasons for the differences in translation strategies adopted involve not only the historical-political factors and translation purposes, but also the target readers’ acceptability of foreign cultures. To better communicate Chinese classic culture to foreign readers, translators should pay special attention not only to the differences between Chinese culture and foreign cultures, but to target readers’ acceptability of alien cultures, and adopt proper translating strategies accordingly to cater to the development and changes of target readers’ acceptability of alien cultures.When target readers have little knowledge of the source culture, translators should use domestication to make their translations fluent, easy and readable in the target language to avoid or minimize cultural conflict. When target readers have had some knowledge of the source culture and been able to appreciate some cultural information in the source text, translators should increase gradually the use of foreignization in their translation so as to convey more cultural information to target readers. When target readers have possessed enough background information of the source culture, translators can make full use of foreignization to pass on the source culture to the target world. The communication of one culture to foreign worlds, to some extent, follows the process of failed foreignization to initial domestication, to domestication used together with foreignization, and finally to successful foreignization. The spreading of source cultures can be gradually and more satisfactorily realized and target readers’ acceptability of foreign cultures can be satisfied when this developing change between domestication and foreignization is followed by translators.Therefore translators, as cultural envoys of the source culture, should have a full understanding of the differences between the source and target cultures, cater properly to target readers’ acceptability of foreign cultures, and follow the principle of gradual introduction of foreign cultural elements in their translations on the basis of the reality of cultural differences between the source and the target. Only by following this principle can translators become better envoys between Chinese culture and western cultures.