English Translation Of "Death" Euphemisms In A Dream Of Red Mansions From The Perspective Of Translation Aesthetics

Euphemisms refer to a type of linguistic and sociocultural phenomenon which express something uncomfortable with pleasant words.The purpose of using euphemisms is to avoid making listeners embarrassed or unpleasant.A Dream of Red Mansions is a classical masterpiece of China's literary achievements.Many euphemisms can be found in it,and only the number of “death” euphemisms is more than 100.People from all over the world are often unwilling to mention “death” directly but using euphemisms instead because “death” is an inevitable process in life and can cause awe and uneasiness.Translation aesthetics is the combination of translation and aesthetics,studying translation through aesthetics.Liu Miqing's translation aesthetics theory is a subject which studies aesthetic subject,object,and aesthetic reproduction of translation.It can provide an important guiding role for translators to pursue aesthetics in translation activities.This paper selects two English versions of Hawkes and Yang Xianyi as corpus,aiming to analyze the aesthetic reproduction and discuss the loss or retention of euphemisms in the process of C-E translation.The main findings are as follows: In the process of euphemisms translation,both Yang's and Hawkes' s translations have aesthetic loss or retention,mainly due to different languages,aesthetic standards,and the influence of subjective initiatives.Aesthetic loss cannot be avoided,but the translation quality of euphemisms need be based on characteristics of the source language,target language(aesthetic object)and the subjective initiatives of the translators(aesthetic subject),otherwise it is easy to bring misunderstandings to readers.