3.2 Factors Influencing Hawkes’ Translation 11

3.2.1 Cultural Background of the Translator 11

        3.2.2 Translation Purpose of the Translator 12

3.2.3 Subjectivity of the Translator … ………12

4. Conclusion 14

References.15

1. Introduction

    Hong Lou Meng, one of the greatest Chinese classical novels, is often seen as “an encyclopedia of Chinese culture”, in which the dietetic activities of various characters are depicted thoroughly and comprehensively.

1.1 Research Background

    Many translators in different countries tried their best to introduce this great work to their country fellows. And many researches also have been done on the translation of Hong Lou Meng at home and abroad so far. 

     There are scholars who have done research concerning the translation of the dietetic culture in Hong Lou Meng, however, most of them mainly focused on the translation of the cuisine names. For instance, scholar Dai Qinge and Yang Chenghu (2009) made a contrastive study of the translation of the dietary names in the two versions of Hong Lou Meng. By studying the differences of the dietary names in these two versions, they have revealed different cultural implications in the semantic choices and in diction. And also scholar Yang Xiaoru (2011) also focused on studying the translation of cuisine names in Hong Lou Meng. She has analyzed the major factors influencing the translator’s choice when they translate the cuisine names in Hong Lou Meng as well as the cuisine names from the perspective of dietary culture. And by studying the two versions of translation by Hawkes and Yang, she found that though coming from different cultural backgrounds, they showed the same translating tendency and their translation differences lie more in methods than in strategy choice. This is an interesting point that I may take into consideration in my thesis. 

     Surely, apart from the scholars studying the translation of cuisine names, there are also many scholars doing research on the translation of Hong Lou Meng in a wilder range. Scholar Deng Yuyu (2011) analyzes the differences between the two most authoritative full-text versions by comparing the translations of names, colors and idioms. According to Deng, in the case of name translation, Yang and Dai mainly used the method of transliteration as Hawkes has adopted the method of free translation in order to highlight the features of the character. For example, when translating the names of “Ying-er” (莺儿), Yang just adopted the Chinese pronunciation of “Ying-er” while Hawkes translated as “Golden Oriole” in accordance with the meaning of her original name “Huang Jinying” (黄金莺) and also gives readers an impression of her ingenuity. When it comes to the translation of colors, he takes the two translations of the color “red” as an example. While Yang translated the name of Baoyu’s residence as “Happy Red Court”, however, in Hawkes’ version, it becomes “The House of Green Delight” for the reason that “red” is a color related with violence, danger or death in western culture. So in order to avoid western readers’ misunderstanding, Hawkes has changed “red” into “green”, the color representing peace and joy in western culture. Scholar Hou Baohua (2012) compares the two versions of translation by analyzing the translation of religious translation in Hong Lou Meng. He believes it is the different culture identities, backgrounds and translation purposes of the two translators that made these two English versions have totally different guiding ideas and translating strategies. Scholar Sun Yang (2012) believes Hawkes successfully manages to convey to the western readership notions and concepts purely Chinese that lie beneath the literal surface, that is, he carries on a successful cross-cultural communication under the principle of faithfulness to the original text, although his faithfulness is in a broader, higher sense. So he undertakes the research of Hawkes' translation of speech discourse, a topic which can reflect David Hawkes' master-hand in achieving high-level or broad-sense equivalence and effecting cross-cultural communication. He has mainly taken the speech discourses of Grannie Liu(刘姥姥), Nannie Zhao(赵嬷嬷) and Xing Xiuyan (邢岫烟) as examples to analyze, coming to the conclusion that David Hawkes renders true-to-life and distinct rather than lifeless and invariant characters through manipulating at different levels of language, and conforming to the literary model of English tradition. Scholar Wu Shengnan (2011) studies the translation of the description about Lin Daiyu’s personality in David Hawkes’ The Story of the Stone. She has mainly discussed the translation skills Hawkes used to convey the information of Daiyu’s personality, including choosing proper words, adding the translator’s own understanding, transformation, use of figure of speech, fuzzy expression and also translating allusions. And she also praises Hawkes’ translation as “fluent, just like rewriting this great novel in English” and has achieved the aim of being easily accepted by the foreign readers and reflecting the personalities of the character vividly. While Doctor Shen Weiyan (2009) pays her attention mainly to the translation of clothing culture in Hong Lou Meng. She holds the viewpoint that the clothing culture is one of the most important traditional Chinese cultures depicted in Hong Lou Meng. Scholar Yang Li (2004), on the other hand, takes some poems, ci, songs, fu and allusions in Hong Lou Meng as study object. She believes different translation approaches or patterns result from different translation purpose, serve different readers and get different readers. And only when translators take advantages of all translation approaches or patterns, can they reproduce the cultural connotation of Hong Lou Meng, achieve the goal of cultural communication between China and western countries.