Translation Of Granny Liu’s Characteristic Language:A Comparative Study Of The Two English Versions Of Hong Lou Meng

Hong Lou Meng,a novel written by the famous Chinese litterateur Cao Xueqin,is one of the four Chinese literature classics(Water Margin,Romance of the Three Kingdoms,Journey to the West,and Hong Lou Meng)in the 18~thh century during the Qing Dynasty.It is honored as one of the most influential chapter-style novels in the world and worldwidely acknowledged to be the peak of classical novel in China.It is also being praised as an encyclopedia of the feudal society and the culmination of the Chinese traditional culture.This novel follows a clue of the love tragedy between Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu,describing the rise and the decline of the aristocratic Jia family.Hong Lou Meng,with its unprecedented literary attainments,has exerted a great influence on many scholars and readers.In the 1970s,the British Sinologist David Hawkes and John Minford translated the novel into English and named it as The Story of the Stone.At the end of the 1970s,the Chinese famous translator Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang also finished their translation of this work that is called Dream of Red Mansions.From then on,there have been many research on it.In recent years,several research have focused on the existing English versions of Hong Lou Meng from different perspectives.The analysis of this essay is based on Newmark’s communicative translation and semantic translation theory.It will be illustrated from five aspects,including the Buddhist words,the addressing terms,the common sayings,the slangs and the formal language to carry out a comparative analysis on the Granny Liu’s characteristic language in the English versions of Hong Lou Meng by Hawkes and Yang.Also,this essay will compare and contrast the different translation strategies in terms of the old woman’s language.It will demonstrate the factors that have influenced their strategies.Furthermore,it will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of their strategies.This paper shows that in the course of rendering the Granny Liu’s characteristic language in Hong Lou Meng,Yang generally adopted the semantic translation while Hawkes adopted a communicative translation by collecting and classifying the old woman’s individual language.From the result of comparison and analysis,we find that because of the profound Chinese culture and the expressive original text,it is a great responsibility for translator to translate the original culture information.However,the semantic translation adopted by Yang is of significance to transfer the culture information of the original.Due to the cultural background of Yang’s version,readers are required to have a higher level of understanding;while Hawkes’version focuses particular groups of readers with limited knowledge of the Chinese culture,so the communicative translation can help them to obtain a better understanding of the novel.In this case,the translation purposes cannot be ignored as well.By understanding the Newmarks’theory and analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of these two English versions,the author presents that the communicative translation and the semantic translation are not contradictory but rather complementary to each other.