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An Investigation into the Hybridity Phenomenon of Poetry Translation in Hong Lou Meng

Author: LiYing
Tutor: ZhangZhiQiang
School: Henan Normal
Course: English Language and Literature
Keywords: Domestication Foreignization Hybridity Degree of hybridity Poems in Hong Lou Meng
CLC: I046
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2011
Downloads: 66
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Abstract

Post-colonialism was initiated in 1970s, and has been widely concerned in the academic researches. It rapidly becomes one of the most influential literary and cultural theories. Homi K. Bhabha, one of the outstanding representatives of postcolonialism, put forward the famous“hybridity theory”, aiming to deconstruct and demystify the classical canon of the Western imperial colonialism, to resist the Euro-American cultural hegemony, to diminish the West centrism, to eliminate the binary opposition, and to reconstruct the subjectivity of the Subaltern and the“minorities”or the weak culture with the aspiration to help them find their own cultural identity.Hong Lou Meng is a fairy blossom in the garden of world literature. The author Cao Xueqin, with his own experience and his remarkable writing skills, presents before readers a vivid and realistic history of the declining feudal society. Hong Lou Meng is abundant in contents, including many such aspects as the art of architecture, food culture, medicine, health preserving, custom, etiquette, poetry, all forms of life and so on, due to which it is considered as the encyclopedia for studying the ancient Chinese literature and culture. It is universally acknowledged among translation scholars that the Yangs’version adopts foreignizing strategy and Hawkes’s version adopts domesticating strategy in their translation of Hong Lou Meng. While hybridity theory claims that there is no absolute foreignization or domestication, because all translated versions are hybrid texts, whose differences lie in the degrees of hybridity. The present paper, based upon the‘Hybridity Theory’, will be conducted by comparing and analyzing the two full-text versions so as to investigate the hybridity phenomenon of the poetry translation in Hong Lou Meng.The thesis points out that both of the Yangs’version and Hawkes’version are hybrid texts and the difference between them is the degree of hybridity. Generally speaking, the former has higher degree of hybridity than the latter. The thesis indicates that it does not mean that the higher the degree of hybridity it keeps, the better a translation is, and that a good translation should keep an appropriate degree of hybridity, because a good translation should aim to transmit the otherness of the original information and attract the target audiences as well. The thesis also shows that from the perspective of postcolonialism, the Yangs’version is better than Hawkes’s, but generally speaking, these two versions are both successful translations. They bridge the gap between the Chinese culture and western culture, and the translators of the two versions have made great contributions to the cultural communication between China and western countries.

An Investigation into the Hybridity Phenomenon of Poetry Translation in Hong Lou Meng

Abstract

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