It is well-known that different strategies’ adoption can result in different production. In the author’s opinion, ETCC should focus more on the readability and accessibility of the translated work under cross-cultural situations. Overly domestication can only impede the acceptance of the original work, which will later result in the cultural marginalization of the origin culture. As A Dream of Red Mansions is not as welcomed as the Story of the Stone in foreign countries, we must realize that ETCC should not be fixated on the formation and profundity of the translated work, but adapt to target language readers’ aesthetic habit and psychological expectation, provide them with a cross-cultural product they can accept, promote the Chinese culture, to further translate works with higher domestication level.
1.3 The Overall Structure of the Thesis
The thesis is pided into five chapters. Chapter One is the introduction of the thesis. This chapter also discusses the significance of the thesis. Chapter Two is a brief review of relevant studies on the topic conducted in recent years both domestic and abroad, including Cultural Translation, English Translation of Chinese Classics (ETCC) and researches on A Dream of Red Mansions. Chapter Three presents the research methodology conducted in this research. Due to the massive content of A Dream of Red Mansions, the author intends to only take “the verdicts of the twelve female servants of the Jing Tomb” from Chapter 5 of the novel as the corpora of this study. In Chapter Four, the author lists the results of the research, mainly focus on the defaults in translating words with cultural image and their causes. Also, the author will have a further discussion about how to better cope with cultural words in ETCC. The thesis ends with a conclusion where the research is summarized, the limitations and implications of the research are summed up, and the additional suggestions for further study are also put forward.