A Comparison of Translation Strategies: Hawkes’ and the Yangs’ Translations of Honglou meng

Abstract

Honglou meng, the eighteenth-century Chinese novel by Cao Xueqin, stands as one of the greatest achievements in world literature. Its translation into English has produced two major complete versions: David Hawkes and John Minford's The Story of the Stone (1973–1986) and Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang's A Dream of Red Mansions (1978–1980). These two translations embody fundamentally different translation philosophies. Drawing on Lawrence Venuti's concepts of domestication and foreignization as the primary theoretical framework and supported by Eugene Nida's equivalence theory and Peter Newmark's translation procedures, this paper undertakes a systematic comparative analysis of the two versions across four key textual dimensions: culture-specific items, names and appellations, poetic discourse, and religious and philosophical terminology. The analysis reveals that the Hawkes-Minford version consistently adopts a domesticating strategy, rendering Chinese cultural elements into familiar English forms to maximize readability for the Anglophone reader. In contrast, the Yangs' version follows a predominantly foreignizing approach, preserving the strangeness of the source text and requiring greater cultural effort from its audience. Neither strategy is inherently superior; rather, each serves different readerships and reflects distinct historical and ideological contexts. The paper concludes by arguing that the coexistence of these two approaches enriches the English-language reception of Honglou meng and offers enduring insights for the translation of classical Chinese literature.