Abstract
As China’s influence grows, A Dream in Red Mansions, an encyclopedia of traditional Chinese culture, has attracted widespread attention from scholars at home and abroad. The novel contains many traditional literary genres, including poems, couplets, and lantern riddles. Cao Xueqin depicts in detail many plots of guessing lantern riddles, because lantern riddles play an important part in portraying the characters and reflecting the cultural and spiritual life of the times. However, the lantern riddles are rich in connotations and meaning, making it difficult for the translators to translate. As a result, the difficulty in translating lantern riddles needs to be paid attention to in translation research. The Interpretive Theory is a well-known theory of oral interpretation, but a lot of practice and research have proved that the Interpretive Theory can also be applied to written translation. The Interpretive Theory divides the translation process into three steps: comprehension, deverbalization, and re-expression. According to the Interpretive Theory, translation pursues the equivalence of meaning between the original texts and the translated texts. The thesis uses the Interpretive Theory and its Triangular Model to analyze the translation of the lantern riddles in David Hawkes’s translated version, and discusses the concrete embodiment of the interpretive elements in the process of translating lantern riddles.
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