Disputes still exist linked with the real author of Hong Lou Meng, some people suggest that Zhi Yanzhai should be considered as the author (Deng 49) while a larger percentage of people believe that the former eighty chapters are written by Cao Xueqin and the latter forty chapters are produced by Gao’ e。 This thesis selects Cao’s version as a reference and mainly focuses on two English versions by Yang Xianyi and David Hawkes separately。

Hong Lou Meng covers a variety of things including cooking, housing, poems, family relationships, architecture and so on。 Considering that China and England have different cultural backgrounds, it will be quiet difficult for the English to understand these contents in this novel。 Nida once said in Language, Culture and translating, “The role of language in a culture and the influence of the culture on the meaning of words and idioms are so strong that hardly any text can be fully understood without careful consideration of its cultural background” (Nida 100)。 Therefore translation of cultural elements in literature works brings great challenges to translators。 How to translate Chinese classic literary works into contents that English people can accept becomes a problem。 

2。 Literature Review

2。1 Research abroad

A great number of scholars from England, Japan, French, Germany, Italy and many other countries have studied this topic in the past years。 The first English version of Hong Lou Meng is said to be translated by an English translator John Francis Davis who translated two poems in Hong Lou Meng and published in a journal called The Royal Asiatic Transaction。 Obviously, he does not know the real meaning of Hong Lou Meng as he wrote the sentence that “the following quotation novel called the ‘Dream of the Red Chamber’ is rather a poetical account of a young Chinese profligate。”Even for his misunderstandings, this experience still mark the beginning of the English version of Hong Lou Meng。 Since that time, different kinds of English versions of this great novel start to come out。