[摘要]

《红楼梦》以其精深的文化内涵和出色的语言艺术，成为中国古典小说的巅峰之作。尤其是其书中四百多个人物的对话，均由一动词“笑道”引出，简洁却深刻地表现了其人物的身份、地位、性格特点以及人物之间的关系。然而，杨宪益先生所译的《红楼梦》中却有着不尽相同的“笑道”。译者做出这样的抉择，很大程度上是出于对其意义的理解。不论是日常对话还是文本翻译，意义的理解都十分重要。而对于翻译过程中的词汇对等问题，英国翻译家莫娜·贝克在其《换言之，翻译教程》一书中提出了四种词汇意义。本文正是从莫娜·贝克提出的四种词汇意义来探析杨宪益先生《红楼梦》中“笑道”英译的处理。

[关键词]《红楼梦》，笑道，词汇对等

Abstract:

A Dream of Red Mansions, one of the classical novels in China, boasts the lively and artistic portray of over 400 characters. In this masterpiece, there are many conversions addressed by word “Xiao Dao”, while “Xiao Dao” is not respectively translated into “smile” and “say” instead of “cackle”, “chortle”, “grin”, “giggle”, “beam”, etc. in its English version. To some extent, the translator takes the meaning into consideration. Meaning plays an important role not only in daily conversation but also in the literal translation. This paper, adopting Yang Xianyi’s version A Dream of Red Mansions, analyzes the translation of “smile” from the perspective of equivalence at word level, probing the great artistic charm and how Yang Xianyi recurs the identities, positions and personalities of the characters.

Key Words: A Dream of Red Mansions; translation of smile; word equivalence

1.    Introduction
Mona Baker is an Egyptian professor of translation studies and Director of the Centre for Translation and International Studies at the University of Manchester in England. She is the founder of St. Jerome Publishing where she is editorial director. She also founded the International magazine The Translator. She also wrote many books, such as In Other Words: A Course book on Translation, Text and Technology: In Honor of John Sinclair (writing together with others), Rout ledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, and Corpuslingustics and Translation Studies: Implications and Applications. In the book In Other Words: A Course book on Translation, she introduces her idea on equivalence at word level and gives four types of meaning: propositional meaning, expressive meaning, presupposed meaning and evoked meaning.