Approaching Cultural Faithfulness: A Study Based on the Translation of A Dream of Red Mansions

Abstract

Faithfulness is the fundamental standard of translation. People have different opinions on faithfulness. This study, taking the translation of the Chinese classic A Dream of Red Mansions as an example, investigates the translation of cultural information and proposes that cultural faithfulness is of great importance for cultural communication in literary translation. The translator should use appropriate strategies and methods to convert the cultural information in the target text. To be faithful to the source culture, the translator should be familiar with the political, historical and cultural background of the original text to avoid over-domestication, over-foreignization, zero translation and mistranslation and use zero compensation, compensation in the version, compensation by annotations and compensation by transformation to compensate for the cultural default in specific translations.