Abstract:

Names in A Dream of Red Mansions imply the characters’ personalities and their destiny by the author’s artistic manipulation. At the same time, these names reflect the values, love and hate and writing intention of the writer. So far, there are two English versions of the book: one is Yang Hsien-yi’s version; the other is Hawkes’s version. Due to the influences of different cultures, they use different methods to translate the book. The thesis is to discuss the connotation and translation of characters’ names in A Dream of Red Mansions, and focuses on contrastive study of name translation in the two versions. Also, the thesis explores the advantages and shortcomings of different name translation strategies.

Key words: translation of names; A Dream of Red Mansions; comparative research

摘要：

《红楼梦》中人物的姓名暗示了人物的性格和命运，具有一定的艺术性，同时也折射出了作者的价值观念、爱憎喜怒、创作意图。到目前为止，比较完整的英译本有两个，一个是杨宪益夫妇的，一个是霍克斯的。由于受不同文化的影响，他们采用了不同的翻译方法。本文主要讨论了《红楼梦》中人名的含义及其翻译，重点比较了两个英译本中的人名翻译策略，探讨各种人名翻译策略的效果、利弊。

关键词：姓名翻译；《红楼梦》；对比研究

1. Introduction
As we all know, everybody has a name, which is a symbol of human life and a kind of culture. Different cultures have their own background and contents. Our Chinese language has become one of the most complex and imaginative languages in the world along with its long history. When giving names to newborn babies, we’d like to think a lot in order to give a good name containing good wishes. What’s more, these names have some esthetic values, some of them short but condensed, meaningful and pleasant to hear. Therefore, it’s a hard word to translate the Chinese names into English.
Names in a work can show a writer’s creativity, imagination, experience, understanding, insight and language skills. A Dream of Red Mansions is a complex novel. According to some researches, there are more than 300 characters in A Dream of Red Mansions. Such a large number of people have their unique names, which embody the feature of the characters and give clues of the story. The connotation underlying the name is more important than the name itself. These names form a complicated web because they are evocative and associative.