Abstract

The “hybridity theory”, proposed by Homi Bhabha, claims that there is no absolute domestication or foreignization, because all translated versions are hybrid texts and the difference lies in the degree of hybridity. Hong Lou Meng is a fairy blossom in the garden of world literature. This thesis explored the hybridity in Hong Lou Meng by comparing and analyzing the two versions and pointed out that both of the Yangs’version and Hawkes’ are hybrid texts whose degrees of hybridity is different. Generally speaking, the Yangs’ version contains higher degree of hybridity than Hawkes’. But it does not mean that the higher the degree of hybridity it has, the better the translation is, and that a good translation should involve an appropriate proportion of hybridity. Conclusively, these two versions are both successful translated works, which bridge the gap between the Chinese and western culture, and the translators of the two versions have made great contributions to the cultural communication between China and the West world.

Keywords:  Domestication  Foreignization  Degree of Hybridity  English Versions of Hong Lou Meng

摘要

霍米巴巴提出了著名的“杂合”理论。杂合理论认为，没有绝对归化或异化的翻译，任何译本都是杂合的，其区别在于杂合程度的不同。《红楼梦》是世界文学阆苑里的一朵仙葩，本文通过对杨译本和霍译本进行对比分析，来探讨《红楼梦》两译本中的杂合现象。本论文指出，杨译本和霍译本都是杂合文本，二者的区别在于杂合程度的不同，一般来说，杨译本的杂合程度要高于霍译本。但并非杂合度越高，译文越好，好的译文应该保持适当的杂合度。总体来说，两译本都是成功的译本，他们在中西文化交流中都起到了桥梁的作用，两译本的译者也都为中西文化交流做出了杰出的贡献。

关键词: 归化；异化；杂合度；《红楼梦》英译本

Chapter One Introduction
1.1 The Research Background
Translation, a practical activity, has been working widely in human’s cultural communication. Up to the 1950s, many translation schools had mushroomed. “Apart from linguistic school and the traditional philological school, the western translation theories, namely, translation study schools, deconstructionism, feminist theory, post-colonialism theory and so on, appeared in the nearly twenty years ago”(Han Ziman, 2008). Among them, the hybridity theory, in the light of post-colonialism studies, has attracted more and more scholars. Homi Bhabha introduced the hybridity theory to the field of translation studies. He thinks that there exists a third space in where two cultures communicate. Cultural differences in this space result in the hybridity，which is termed “the third space”, with cultural features of both sides(Bhabha, 1994). Thus translation, as an important channel of communication between two cultures and languages, contains inevitably the features of two cultures and languages found in the translated text. That is what we conceive of “hybridity” in translation process.