Zanghua Yin as a prophecy poem about the fate of Daiyu is an integral part of Hong Lou Meng. Writer combines the beautiful but sad and mild sentences with the extraordinary rhetorical styles, creating the unique artistic conception, which accurately showing the character's character, fate, mood at that time and the natural and social environment. The rhetoric means is an important embodiment of the original author's writing style, and it is also the key and difficult point in the translation. The translation of Hong Lou Meng into English has a history of almost 160 years (1830-1986) and has produced 9 versions. Among these nine versions, the translations by Yang Xianyi and Hawkes are the best known and acknowledged.
This paper tends to use qualitative method, a method or angle to study things from the intrinsic stipulation of them, which is based on the social phenomenon or the attribute of things and the contradictory changes in the movement, contrastive analysis, the systematic study of a pair of languages with a view to identifying their structural differences and similarities and documentary analysis, various procedures involved in analyzing and interpreting data generated from the examination of documents and records relevant to a particular study. With a lot of materials and definitions, the paper compares the two English versions and the original version to figure out in what way the original writing style, thoughts, effects or other things can be transmitted, the untranslatability of poetry in some degree and the possible compensation measures.
Concerned with questions: what is rhetoric? How to judge the untranslatability? How the two English versions translate the rhetorical devices and the comparison between them, the paper consists of five chapters.
Chapter one is an introduction to the whole paper. It mainly talks about the research background, the significance and purpose of the study. In this chapter, it also raises the research questions and introduces the structure of this paper.
Chapter two is the review of theories and literature works. The author gives the detailed illustration of the rhetorical style and translation, some strategies of translation. Focused on the paradox of translation and the comparison between Chinese and English rhetoric, the materials provide the powerful evidence. It also gives a brief introduction of Chinese classical poetry and the original version of Zanghua Yin.
Chapter three, the author presents the two methods adopted in this research, that is, qualitative and quantitative methods. In the first section, the author discusses the definition, function and advantages of qualitative methods. And, section two concerns the data collection and the analysis.
Chapter four, the author discusses the data collected from three main aspects to analyze the translation of rhetorical style in Zanghua Yin: semantic rhetoric, structural rhetoric and phonological rhetorical device, to discuss whether these rhetorical devices can be translated and the effective ways of transmitting the rhetorical style.
Chapter five is the conclusion. The author summarizes the result of the research on translation of rhetorical style in Zanghua Yin. It is the end of the discussion and argues that there are some limitations of poetry translation and the possible compensation strategies.
2. Literature Review
2.1 Rhetorical style and Translation
2.1.1 Definition of Rhetorical Style
Rhetoric is a way of carefully selecting the language on the specific purpose, when the writer is using language, striving to make the words and articles more correct, more understanding, more vivid and more wonderful.
The word rhetoric originates from Greek. It means exquisite speech or the words with higher using frequency in speaking. In ancient Greece, speakers have far-reaching impact, which leads to oratory or rhetoric, logic and grammar being the three basic lessons of the seven lessons in school in medieval. 修辞翻译角度看《葬花吟》英译比较研究(3):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_56237.html