从霍克思译本《红楼梦》看中国古代服饰的翻译技巧文献综述

Literature Review

文献综述

On the Translation of Traditional Costumes in A Dream of Red Mansions

by David Hawkes

从霍克思译本《红楼梦》看中国古代服饰的翻译技巧

1.Introduction

The Chinese traditional civilization and concepts consider the costumes as one kind of symbol of social identity and political status. That makes people play their own role seriously, and never overstep the rule. So, in ancient time, costumes are one part of politics, its importance is far beyond the costumes' status in modern society. And what would be termed as"The Encyclopaedia of Chinese culture ", A Dream of Red Mansions not only has captured the world's attention about its religious culture, catering culture, classical art and literary merit, but also has the unique artistic value of Chinese traditional costumes for over 5000 years.

As one part of A Dream of Red Mansions, the author Cao Xueqin pays much attention to describe characters' costumes which have a great number of varieties, different styles and colorful and amazing collocations, no wonder people call this book" the Grand View Garden of Costumes". So, the research of translations about the traditional costumes in A Dream of Red Mansions will have great influence on the translation of Chinese traditional costumes, and even do little good to the translation of exchanges in Chinese culture between countries in the whole world.

2.Literature Review

2.1. Study in China

A Dream of Red Mansions is generally considered appears in the Qing dynasty, Qianlong period(1745), with the form of original manuscripts copied by hand. But it is only about 16 chapters, then other manuscripts appeared latter, such as the one has been found in

1761. All of these manuscripts are named the Story of the Stone, and made comments by "ZhiYan Zhai". "A Dream of Red Mansions has great artistic achievements. For instance, the novel provides a large number of detailed descriptions of everyday life. Cao Xueqin attained many aspects including poetry, drama, art, architecture, costumes and gardens"(Highlights of Chinese Culture, Song Li,2009).What is reason about the emergence of A Dream of Red Mansions? For what purpose the author write this novel? And with what kind of conditions? These are worth for us thinking about them. Once a famous Redologist named Feng Qiyong (1924) has said the author writes this novel because of the two reasons below: one is the era's ferment of social thoughts which give his too much stimulus, another reason is the decline of his family. The decline of his family compelled him to see the cruel reality, and all of these elements inspired him to write A Dream of Red Mansions(the Inside and Outside word of A Dream of Red Mansions, Feng Qiyong, 2002).

As time goes by, A Dream of Red Mansions have spread out broader and broader gradually for more than 200 years, and also thanks to the people who constantly research and analysis A Dream of Red Mansions, that makes it become the classical novel's writing model. These researchers have a common name -- Redologists. From now on, there are millions of books, papers, reports, speeches and so on which are talking about A Dream of Red Mansions. They talk about the characters, the religion, the traditional etiquette, the architectures, the poems, the translations and so on. However, because of the topic about this paper is about translation techniques, a few examples about these translations' researches by Chinese Redololgists will be introduced after.

From the former content, it is a very obvious conclusion that the English translation of A Dream of Red Mansions only has two complete versions written by Yang Hsien-Yi and Hawkes. After these two versions facing the public, a plenty of people begin to do researches in them, one of these researchers is Professor Chen Hongwei(1944), she says," In 19th century, the research about A Dream of Red Mansions mainly talks about 'suoyin' which means doing researches in finding out the connotations hidden in the original text, that makes the translators translate a few chapters of A Dream of Red Mansions by their own understanding, and lead to many common misconception in the translation. In 1920s, the study of new Redology has a deeper progress of A Dream of Red Mansions, Yang Hsien-Yi