浅析《红楼梦》英译本中典故的处理

《红楼梦》原著中有大量的典故,有些出现在对话中,有些出现在叙述中,还有些出现在诗词中。杨宪益和戴乃迭合译的英译本中,对典故的处理独具匠心,分别采用了直译加注释、直译、意译等方法。比较三种方法,以直译加注释的方法在保证理解无困难的基础上最大限度地保留了原著的艺术风格和语言特色,直译无注释只适用于一部分典故的翻译,而意译则相对损失了较多一些信息,不能充分体现原作的语言特色。

Translation of Allusions in A dream of Red Mansions

There are a lot of Chinese traditional allusions in the famous ancient Chinese novel A Dream of Red Mansions. Some of them appear in the dialogues, some in the story itself, others in the poems. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang used three different approaches, namely, literal translation with notes, literal translation without notes and free translation in the course of translating the novel into English. Among the three approaches, literal translation with notes best retains the features of the language of the original Chinese version, while free translation loses some more information and cannot keep the language as it is in the original Chinese version. And literal translation without notes cannot be used in most of the allusions.