TITLE:
Translating Characters’ Names in Hong Lou Meng during the 20th Century: From Seeking Lexical Equivalence to Maintaining Communicative Function
AUTHORS:
Hao Zhou
KEYWORDS:
Chinese-English Translation, Lexical Equivalence, Functional Equivalence, Translation History, Characters’ Names, Hong Lou Meng
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Access Library Journal,
Vol.2 No.11,
November
20,
2015
ABSTRACT: The classic Chinese novel Hong Lou
Meng has been introduced into many different cultures through an important
medium: translation. Over one dozen of English versions have been published so
far, and have been studied by so many researchers. In those translated works, a
variety of translation strategies are adopted for translating characters’
names. Name translation is a small field of studies on translating Hong Lou Meng, However this topic is not
only interesting but also important. This study examines how characters’ names
in Hong Lou Meng are translated in
the various versions of the novel’s English translation, and investigates the
reasons behind the name-translation strategies. More specifically, this paper
focused on the four English versions of Hong
Lou Meng published in the 1920s and 1970s. Different translation strategies
and associated underpinning reasons are revealed. Specifically, translators in
1920s (e.g. Wang Chi-Chen, 1929) tackled the task of translating names in Hong Lou Meng by word-to-word
translation and pin-yin transcription, placing an emphasis on seeking an equivalence
at the lexical level. Hawkes (1973) and Yangs (1978), on the other hand, made
more efforts to determine the functions of the character names in the source
text and attempted to find methods that would more adequately render the
functions in the translated work. Through examining the prevailing theories for
translating Chinese texts into foreign languages during those two periods,
together with name-translation by different
translators, the study reveals that the changes in translators’ strategy in the
name-translation indicates a shift from seeking lexical equivalence to
maintaining communicative function.