An Interpersonal Analysis On Image Building Of The Translation Of Hongloumeng

As a novel with worldwide influence,Hongloumeng has created various characters.In the process of English translation,their images have also undergone some changes.Therefore,studies on image of characters in English versions of Hongloumeng become an important area.The scholars make some researches and they focus on the clothes,diet,house and trip of main characters or some comparison of several characters.Studies on some specific marginalized characters are not enough.This thesis focuses on the character Granny Liu who is worth studying.Being a small character outside the mainstream,Granny Liu witnessed the rise and fall of Jia’s family by visiting the Grand View Garden for three times,and became the thread of the story.Therefore,doing research on the image of her has some value for the study of Hongloumeng.Besides,former studies are mainly done from translation perspective instead of some interdisciplinary aspects such as linguistics.Later in 1970 s,English linguist M.A.K.Halliday built Systemic-functional Grammar and put forward three functions of language.Among them,interpersonal function views language as the communication of people which implies speakers’ feelings,emotions,status and personalities.Thus,it provides a new viewpoint to analyze character’s image.This research attempts to explore the image of Granny Liu in English versions by Yang Hsien-yi and David Hawkes from an interpersonal aspect.It mainly deals with the following questions:(1)How do translators build the interpersonal meaning of character’s image in the English version of Hongloumeng?(2)Based on interpersonal analysis,what is the difference of Granny Liu’s image built by Yang Hsien-yi and David Hawkes? In order to answer these questions,this thesis firstly sorts out the relevant literature researches on the characters in Hongloumeng and its English translations,affirming the rich exploration of various characters by predecessors.Then,it makes an interpersonal analysis of Granny Liu who appears throughout the whole novel.After collecting Granny Liu’s speech and its two English translations,the relevant data are classified and analyzed from the mood system and modality system,so as to explore her linguistic feature and personal characteristics reflected from them.Based on statistical analysis,this research compares the English versions by Yang Hsien-yi and David Hawkes and gets some major findings:(1)Interpersonal analysis has certain applicability and feasibility in character image analysis,which is conducive to exploring characters’ images.The two translators display the interpersonal meaning of Granny Liu by the mood system and the modality system.By transferring or retaining Granny Liu’s mood and using words with different value,it displays her attitudes,emotion and status during the communication of others which reflects Liu’s various personalities and images.(2)The two translators maintain their own style of translation in terms of mood and modality which enriches her image.Based on the mood system,as a character with much declarative mood,Granny Liu is mainly to offer information so as to provide a viewpoint to witness the life of Jia’s family for readers.In Yang’s translation,he tends to transform the original mood,such as turning the exclamation into a statement,which weakens the strong mood and making the character’s mood softer.Hawkes basically retains the mood of Granny Liu,making her speech faithful to the source text.(3)Based on the modal system,both Yang Hsien-yi and Hawkes tend to use low-value modal operators to make Liu’s language euphemistic.However,Hawkes use more modal operators in total.For those with medium and high value,Yang Hsien-yi has a balanced arrangement,while Hawkes rarely uses high value words.As a result,in Yang’s version,Granny Liu is neither humble nor arrogant,and she handles interpersonal relationships with ease and knows how to behave in different occasions.As a common woman,she is still willing to express her joys and sorrows which makes Liu rich in emotion and like a real person for readers.In Hawkes’ s translation Granny Liu is more composed and humbler with a mild attitude.It expresses her careful and wise ways of dealing with important relationships.To sum up,this study provides a new perspective for the analysis of character images,reflects the applicability of interpersonal analysis in character’s image which is conducive to further exploring the diversity of Granny Liu’s personalities.However,due to limited time and energy,this paper only selects two English translations for research,and the collected data is not rich enough.It is hoped that more corpora will be analyzed in the future to enrich the research results.In addition,this thesis only focuses on the character called Granny Liu,and the applicability of the conclusions drawn to other characters is unknown,hoping more characters selected for further verification in the future.