（外国语言学及应用语言学专业论文）析《红楼梦》杨译本的转喻翻译策略.pdf

iv 析红楼梦杨译本的转喻翻译策略 研究生：朱 翔 年级：2005 级 研究方向：语用学 指导老师：韦 汉 教 授 学科专业：外国语言学及应用语言学 摘 要 全球化时代，文化多样性越来越受到人们的关注，翻译在跨文化交际中发挥着重要的 作用。转喻是一个认知模式，是人类认知世界的强有力的工具，转喻映射不是任意的，而 是受到文化的制约。红楼梦是中国文化的百科全书，其中使用了大量的转喻，转喻的 翻译必将直接影响到译文是否成功，而红楼梦中转喻翻译策略的研究尚未引起应有的 重视，其语料库也有待建立。 杨宪益、戴乃迭夫妇是中国翻译史上久负盛名的翻译家， 红 楼梦译本是杨宪益夫妇杰出的代表作，是中西合璧的结晶。以杨宪益夫妇的红楼梦 译本作样本来讨论转喻的翻译策略具有重要意义，这对翻译策略的研究、翻译实践和翻译 教学都具有很高的价值。 传统翻译策略研究大都基于个人主观印象进行主观判断，存在诸多局限性。而应用客 观分析并作为判断依据，可以有效克服主观判断的缺陷。本文以转喻的认知特点为基础， 通过汉英转喻的语用模式对比，采用定性和定量的方法探讨了杨宪益红楼梦中转喻翻 译策略。作者建立了杨译版红楼梦的小型语料库, 迅速、便捷地获取了研究所需的数 据和英、汉语料，所有采集的数据用 clec 检索统计软件进行研究，对杨宪益、戴乃迭的 转喻翻译策略进行了阐释和分析。 本文比较了中、英转喻异同，研究分析了杨宪益夫妇在翻译红楼梦中的转喻策略。 通过研究发现进行转喻翻译的必要前提有三个：1) 深入了解原语和目的语中的文化异同； 2) 把握转喻字面意义与实际意义之间的关系；3) 对转喻进行文化阐释以拆除语言的视觉 屏障。本文提出翻译具有文化共性的转喻可以使用直译法，而对具有文化异质性的转喻可 采用：直译保留形象法；直译加注法；引伸法；略去转喻法；转换喻体形象法。翻译有文 化异质性转喻的五种策略可以分为归化、异化两大类。直译加注译法和归化略去转喻法最 好只作为补充方法。如果翻译是以文化传输为目的，可以主要采用异化法；如果不是以文 化传输为目的，则应注重文化适应性。在翻译汉英转喻过程中，绝对的归化和异化都不可 能实现，必须灵活地综合采用多种方法，最大限度地把语义传达给目标语的读者。 本文丰富了转喻翻译和中译英的理论，进一步探索了翻译策略的语料库研究法。在现 实意义上，对转喻翻译实践具有积极的指导意义，有助于英语语言、文化和中英翻译的教 学，同时促进中国和英语民族的跨文化交流。 关键词： 转喻； 红楼梦 ；中译英；翻译策略 v an analysis of translating metonymy in a dream of red mansions by yang hsien- yi and gladys yang postgraduate: zhu xiang grade: 2005 orientation: pragmatics supervisor: p r o f . w e i h a n major field of study: foreign linguistics 2) understanding the relationship between the metonymy and the tenor; 3) cultural interpretation of the metonymy to overcome the visual obstacle of language. the thesis suggests that we can use literary translation in translating metonymies with common models, and we can adopt five strategies in translating metonymies vi with unique cultural factors: literal translation, retaining the image; literal translation with footnotes; converting the metonymy to its implied meaning in the context; replacing the sl image with an established tl image; omitting the metonymy. these five strategies can be divided into two main trends: foreignization and domestication. literal translation with footnotes and omitting the metonymy can be used as the compensation methods. if the aim of the translation is cultural message transition, we can mainly employ foreignization in the translation of metonymy with different cultural factors. if not, we should pay attention to cultural compatibility. in the course of chinese- english translation, absolute domestication or foreignization can t be realized, we should adopt a comprehensive measure, convey the information in the original works at its maximum. theoretically, this thesis enriches the theory of metonymy translation and chinese english translation, further explores the corpus- based study of translation strategies. practically, the research sheds light on metonymy translation, helps the teaching and learning of english language, english culture and chinese english translation. it also promotes the cross- cultural communication between chinese and english peoples. key words: metonymy; a dream of red mansions; chinese- english translation; translation strategy vii list of figures fig. 1 distribution of every strategy.18 fig. 2 distribution of foreignization and domestication.18 fig. 3 the continuum from foreignization to domestication.19 论文独创性声明 本人郑重声明：所提交的学位论文是本人在导师的指导下进行的研究工 作及取得的成果。除文中已经注明引用的内容外，本论文不含其他个人或其 他机构已经发表或撰写过的研究成果。对本文的研究作出重要贡献的个人和 集体，均已在文中以明确方式标明。本人承担本声明的法律责任。 研究生签名： 日期： 论文使用授权声明 本人完全了解广西师范大学有关保留、使用学位论文的规定。广西师范 大学、中国科学技术信息研究所、清华大学论文合作部，有权保留本人所送 交学位论文的复印件和电子文档，可以采用影印、缩印或其他复制手段保存 论文。本人电子文档的内容和纸质论文的内容相一致。除在保密期内的保密 论文外，允许论文被查阅和借阅，可以公布（包括刊登）论文的全部或部分 内容。论文的公布（包括刊登）授权广西师范大学学位办办理。 研究生签名： 日期： 导 师签名： 日期： iii acknowledgements first and foremost, i owe much to my supervisor, dr. wei han, without his dedicated guidance, insightful suggestions, critical comments and generous time spent revising the article; this thesis would not have been possible. i have also benefited greatly from his keen intuitions about language and life in general. his attitude toward academic research and life will be a great asset in my future career and life. i should thank prof. bai jingze, prof. li xiao, pro. tang gaoyuan, pro. chen jitang, pro. liu shaozhong, pro. zhang shaolin and many other professors at the college of foreign studies. during the course of my graduate study, the professors enlightening lectures have inspired me a passion for research. their wonderful lectures proved to be indispensable to my thesis constructing and writing. i extend my sincere thanks to my fellow classmates as well as friends for their friendship and kindness during the course of the three- year study and writing the thesis. last but not least, my heartfelt gratitude goes to my parents, grandmother and my dear husband. their love has supported me through my graduate study and will continue to spur me to achieve new successes. 1 chapter 1 introduction translation is important to cross- cultural communication. as one of the cognitive models of mankind, metonymy is pervasive in language and heavily culture- loaded. metonymy translation cannot be ignored. based on the features of metonymy and the contrast between chinese and english metonymy, with a case study on a dream of red mansions translated by yang hsien- yi and gladys yang, the thesis tries to explore the translation strategies of metonymy in chinese- english translation. 1.1 background of the study hong loumeng, one of the greatest classical chinese novels, was written in the mid- eighteenth century during the reign of emperor qian long of the qing dynasty (1644- 1911). it has been popular throughout the last two hundred years and more. hong loumeng is a resplendent pearl in the treasure- house of chinese literature, a prosperous chinese language art garden. in a book called folk ballads of the capital, published in the early 19th century during the reign of jiaqing period in the qing dynasty, there are following two lines, “ one cannot call himself erudite without touching upon red mansions in his talk” (the yangs, 1994: 10). the great value of this novel lies not only in its artistic use of language and its subtle portrayal of characters, but also in its vivid reflection of the then chinese society and culture by presenting the prosperity and decline of the four major families. therefore, it is of great significance to introduce this great work to the work outside china. yang hsien- yi and gladys yang are the well- known translators in chinese translation history, they make great contributions to chinese translation. they devote their lives to introducing a large number of excellent chinese literature works to the west and the western to chinese readers. the large number and high quality of their translation works are incomparable. a dream of red mansions is their masterpiece and the result of the sino- western combination. many present translation textbooks quotes from this book as classical examples to induce and interpret the methods in successful translation. obviously, exploring the translation strategies of metonymy in chinese- english translation with a case study on a dream of red mansions translated by yang hsien- yi and gladys yang is meaningful. since the beginning of the 20th century, the metonymy study abroad has formed a comparatively complete system. they f ound that metonymy, one of the cognitive models of mankind, is closely related to the culture and important in cross- cultural communication. metonymies in hong loumeng include profound cultural implications, give vivid descriptions to characters, things and scenery. they help readers to gain a penetrating, thorough and easy 2 understanding of the text and chinese culture, thus greatly enhance the novel s effects. because metonymy is also a complicated language phenomenon, based on man s basic experiences and has strong cultural colors, whether the translation of metonymy is successful or not will directly affect the quality of the translated writing and the cross- cultural communication. the translation of metonymy needs not only a proper understanding in cultures implied in the metonymy, but also a thorough familiarity with the generation of metonymy. they are the prerequisites of metonymy translation. corpora have been used in descriptive translation studies in recent years. corpora refers to “ bodies of texts assembled in a principled way” (johansson, 1995: 19); a text is “ an instance of language in use, either spoken or written: a piece of language behavior which has occurred naturally, without the intervention of the linguist” (schmied, 1993: 4). the application of a corpus in translation studies affords us the possibility of carrying out an objective analysis of yangs translation strategies of metonymy, and goes beyond the limitations of the traditional research in the field, which is normally subjective. the application of corpus techniques in the field of translation studies is still in its infancy. in the early nineties, work in this area began to yield some concrete findings, albeit on a relatively small scale. in china large- scale parallel corpus is still being compiled and cannot be used freely, the parallel copora and specialized corpora which are valuable references for translation studies seem scarce. the limited availability of computerized corpora requires us to make our own self- established corpus. 1.2 objectives of the study in this study, a tiny corpus has been constructed. a dream of red mansions by yang hsien- yi and gladys yang, with 515,730 words, is scanning recorded, saved as “ .txt” file and proofread manually. due to the lack of an authorized collection, the author chooses the typical metonymy in hong loumeng, and consults two dictionaries: chinese metonymy dictionary compiled by han chenqi, the only dictionary on metonymy, and the dictionary of hong loumeng compiled by zhou ruchang to make sure all the data selected are real metonymies. all the metonymies found are tagged. the corpus is testified to be quite useful for the present research. attention has been paid to the exploration of what lies behind the statistics obtained by using the corpus. the analysis outcome of data gives a vivid reflection of the percentages of different translation strategies that the yangs tend to favor. the present study addresses the following questions: 1. what strategies did yang hsien- yi and gladys yang adopt in translation of metonymy in a dream of red mansions? illustrate and analyze each strategy. 2. according to the corpus study, what strategy was the translators preference in the 3 translation of metonymy? 3. how can we translate metonymy in chinese- english translation? 1.3 organization of the thesis altogether there are five chapters in this thesis. chapter 1 serves as an introduction to study objectives, providing an account of the research background and the meaning of the research. chapter 2 is the literature review of metonymy. this chapter firstly points out metonymy is heavily cultural- loaded. then the traditional and cognitive viewpoints of metonymy are stated, the researches on translation of metonymy are reviewed. chapter 3 gives a detailed description of the methodology of the research, including the samples, procedures and specific methods. chapter 4 is the most important part of the thesis, which explores the translation strategies of metonymy in a dream of red mansions by the yangs. it reports the results obtained from the corpus study, analyzes the common and different models of metonymy between chinese and english, gives a detailed illustration and discussion about the translation strategies we can explore in dealing with metonymies. chapter 5 is the conclusion. in this chapter some conclusions from the major findings are summarized and the significance is discussed. then after the limitations of the present study are the suggestions for further research. 4 chapter 2 literature review in the following chapter we will do some brief reviews on the metonymy. the contents of this chapter include metonymy and culture, the traditional and cognitive view on metonymy, and previous researches on metonymy translation. 2.1 metonymy and culture culture is one of the most complex words in english, and it is a large and evasive concept. the defining of culture is very difficult, and till now there is no single definition on which everybody agrees. the definition widely quoted was formulated by anthropologist edward taylor in 1871, “ culture is a complex integrity that includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as member of society” (feng qinghua, 2002: 113). there are also many classifications of culture, though they are different in one way or another, but after a careful examination, we can find they overlap one another: culture is composed of ethnic cultural spirit, way of thinking and psychological characteristic that is formed by specific historical background constituted of ethnic geopolitics and geo- society. the four basic features of culture are ethnic features, heritage feature, drift feature and compatibility feature. language is a part of the culture, it is indispensable for both the functioning and the perpetuation of the culture. mode of thinking binds culture and language together and bridges them. the close relationship between language and culture is well expressed in the statement, “ nothing is of greater strategic importance than the language through which its beliefs are expressed and transmitted and by which most interaction of its members takes place” (nida, 2001: 78- 93). metonymy is a linguistic phenomenon and one of human being s basic thinking modes. the emergence of human culture has changed the metonymy as well. with its development, the human cultures play an increasing function in the forming of new expressions. and the influence of culture is proved to be an important factor that accounts for the differences between english and chinese metonymies. we can say every pattern of metonymy reflects the characteristics of the thought of a people and its culture. wang xijie argues that “ if we collect an array of metonymies frequently used in one language, we will get a clue of the collective thoughts and preferred cultural values of its people” (wang xijie, 2004). it is an indisputable fact that metonymy is intimately related to culture and metonymy translation is not only an activity between languages but also a process of cultural exchange and transmission of the cultural connotation. nida argues that “ the most serious mistakes in translating are usually made not because of verbal inadequacy, but of wrong 5 cultural assumptions” (nida, 2001: 78- 93). we can say culture is of primary importance in metonymy translation, if the translator does not take culture into full consideration, it may lead to mistranslation. 2.2 traditional view of metonymy 2.2.1 the nature of metonymy the study of metonymy has a long history both in the west and in china. traditionally, metonymy belongs to the realm of rhetoric. metonymy was thought of as a matter of language, especially literary or figurative language. it is claimed that metonymy operates on name of things, involves the substitution of the name of one thing for that of another thing and assumes that the two things are somehow associated. for examples, a. the kettle is boiling. here, the kettle is used to refer to the water in the kettle. because the kettle is much easier to see than the contents in it, people use the easily- perceived kettle to refer to the contents. b. sceptre and crown, must tumble down, and in the dust be equal made, with the poor crooked scythe and spade. (james shirley, death the leveller) in this poem, “ sceptre and crown” imply the king, while “ scythe and spade” are the tools used by the normal european farmers at that time, they refer to farmers. metonymy, originating in italian “ metonumia” , “ meto- ” means “ change” or “ after” , “ - numia” means “ name” , so “ metonumia” has the meaning “ change of name” . the first use of the term “ metonymy” can be found in ancient greek philosophy, and more specifically in the famous debate about the arbitrariness or naturalness of signs. householder (1995: 93) points out that “ metonymy” is one of the four arguments offered by democritus in favor of arbitrariness, i.e. the fact that words and meaning change. aristotle in chapter 21 of his poetics distinguished among four classes of “ metaphors” : (metaphor is) the application of a strange term by transference either from genus and to species or from species to genus, or from one species to another or else by analogy (aristotle 1927: 27). the first two (genus to species, and species to genus) apply to what we know today as synecdoche, the third type (species to species) is what we know today as metonymy and the fourth type (analogy) corresponds to what we know today as metaphor. many people are confused to distinct the concept “ m etonymy” from “ synecdoche” . in most cases, it s very difficult to tell the difference between “ metonymy” and “ synecdoche” , as both of them involve substitution and in both cases, the substituting word is used in a transferred sense 6 and the relationship between the substitution and the substituted are so near that the mention of one naturally calls the other to the mind. linguists such as ullmann, lakoff, taylor an