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The novel Hong Lou Meng is also the gem of the world literature. Its literary value is highly appraised and appreciated around the world. Its translation can be compared to a magnificent project, which inevitably involves the consideration of the denotative meaning as well as the connotative meaning of the color terms. Therefore, the study of the translation of the color term “red” is to take a glance of the difference between English and Chinese in its linguistic feature and cultural connotation.
2. Literature Review
According to Zhang Peiji, English color terms can be categorized into two general groups, namely, basic color terms and color terms with colors of objects.
Every nation has its peculiar color system, in which the number and category of colors vary as to meet the need of cognition in different social environment. For people all over the world, the colors of the rainbow are the same, but this does not necessarily follow that people speaking different languages pide the color spectrum in the same way or use terms that designate the same range of hue (Dai Weidong, 2010: 134). Based on a selection and comparison of color terms from ninety-eight languages or dialects, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay (1969) asserted that although different languages have different numbers of basic color terms, the color terms of all languages tend strongly to be made up of a set of eleven color categories, which refer to the basic color terms. Take RED for example, color terms in this color category are quite many, like red, scarlet, crimson, cardinal, pink, rubicund, florid, vermillion, cerise, and so on. In Chinese, there are also many terms referring to red, or different shades of red, like 红, 绛, 猩红, 朱红, 赤. In other words, even though languages vary somewhat in their color terminology, the variation is apparently not random. That is to say, the denotative meaning of the color terms is basically the same in every language.源/自:优尔:;论-文'网www.youerw.com
In addition to the fact that different languages may have different pisions of colors; different languages provide different color associations. In other words, the same color term in different languages may be entailed with different connotations. Connotation means “the implication of a word, apart from its primary meaning” according to the Longman Modern English Dictionary. G. Leech recognized seven types of meaning in his Semantics, in which he claimed that the connotative meaning means what is communicated by virtue of what language refers to. It is easy to understand that the same color term in English and Chinese may differ in their connotative meaning due to they have different language origins.
Many domestic scholars have made the researches on the translation of the color term RED in original novel, and they have made great achievements in this field. The studies on color terms are listed as follows:
Xiao Weiqing analyzed Hawks’s translation strategies of how to translate “red” appeared in the novel (2004). Liu Li made a comparison between the associative meaning of the color word in English and Chinese from the translation of color word “red” (2009). Wen Zhen discussed the translation of “red” in Hong Lou Meng (2010). Su Dan (2007) made a tentative study on the translation strategies of color words in Hong Lou Meng. Liu Rong (2011) made the sudy on the color word Hong (Red) in the two English version of Hong Lou Meng from the perspective of skopos theory.
Most of the scholars have dealt with the comparison between English and Chinese color terms to probe into translating strategies, but failed to discuss the factors influencing translators’ translation strategies .What is more, when it comes to the categorization of color words, most of the previous studies just carry out a systematic analysis of different translation of colors in English and Chinese, but no interpretation on its roots that cause. It should be noted that cultural difference is one of the most important factors influencing color terms’ translation except translation purposes.