Cao Xueqin's "Hong Lou Meng" written in the late 1750s is deserved to be called a pioneer among modern Chinese novels as it broke away from the traditional narrative centered around heroes, described various personalities of characters and their daily...
Cao Xueqin's "Hong Lou Meng" written in the late 1750s is deserved to be called a pioneer among modern Chinese novels as it broke away from the traditional narrative centered around heroes, described various personalities of characters and their daily life in detail and showed dramatic storylines. Literature depicts lives through stories and classics include history and lessons. "Hong Lou Meng" popularized for centuries, faithfully represents the culture and era of the Qing Dynasty in China so readers can glimpse into nobility’s lifestyles in Qing Dynasty, including their attire, cuisine, and everyday objects. Moreover, it is recognized as one of China's Four Great Classical Novels along with "Journey to the West", "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" and "Water Margin". This study examines two modern Korean translations of poetry in "Hong Lou Meng" by combining descriptive analysis and corpus analysis from the perspective of translation aesthetics. As the source text corpus, 233 poems were collected from the novel's 120 chapters and two translation corpora was made from one Korean version translated by jointly Choi Yongchul and Go Minhee of Nanam publisher and the other version translated by Hong Sanghun of Sol Publisher. Through quantitative analysis, two Korean versions are compared, and the first 80 chapters and the last 40 chapters were also done in vocabulary, word usage, and translation styles. With the two translations’ corpus, type/token ratio (TTR), standardized type/token ratio (STTR), sentence length, high-frequency vocabulary, keywords, and word class distribution were analyzed with WordSmith Tools 7.0. According to the results, Nanam's translation is more concise, retaining all original punctuation while Sol's translation exhibits higher vocabulary diversity and omits punctuation more frequently. In addition, the comparison with the source text corpus confirms the significant influence of the original text's vocabulary on the translations. Images from word embedding show similar vocabulary distribution within each translator's work for the first 80 and the last 40 chapters, ensuring fidelity to the original. However, when considering the entire 120 chapters, changes in translation style become evident, particularly when involving more than one translator. Additionally, in the distribution of high-frequency vocabulary, the single translator from Sol produces a more tightly clustered translation than the two translators from Nanam, indicating greater consistency in vocabulary usage by a single translator. This affirms that, in poetry translation, individual translation styles and strategies as well as the original text impact the final translation. The study conducts qualitative analysis applying translation aesthetics. In Liu Miqing's translation aesthetics, translation refers to the aesthetic subject's process of aesthetically representing the aesthetic object. The analysis involves examining the aesthetic subject first and analyzing the artistic features of "Hong Lou Meng" poetry through formal and informal systems contained in the aesthetic object. Evaluation is conducted at the phonetic, lexical, and syntactic levels, as well as emotional states, imagery, and artistic conception, as important elements in Chinese aesthetics. Both poetry translation versions followed fidelity. Moreover, it was encouraging that enhancing a translator's subjective agency can improve the quality of translation although the aesthetic subject of translation is constrained by the aesthetic object.